Narratives of climate chaos are “apocalyptic manhood” par excellence – the alt right is terrified of climate extinction, but those fears are mobilized as racial terror and violence - Prefer Indigenous states of emergency for sovereignty as existential .

In the chaos of changing climates, the racialized extinction imperatives of the state of emergency become even more literally, and literarily, evident. The disparities attending the state of emergency are frequently implied in the literary mode of apocalypse as it habitually links to crisis, catastrophe, and environmental disaster. From the Greek word apokalypsis, meaning “something revealed or uncovered,” the apocalyptic mode of storytelling is often associated with a Judeo- Christian tradition that narrates revelation and judgment day, the promise of the end of the world and a new beginning for a particular people. This genealogy of apocalypse tellingly traces the same colonial and capitalist epistemologies associated with the anthropocentric Western literary tradition that Amitav Ghosh recently credited with the lead role in “our” tragic failure in the face of global climate chaos.4 Though Ghosh diagnoses this as a universal epistemological deficit he deems the Great Derangement, the insufficiency is more precisely placed within the story of catastrophe that is, according to René Girard, a formula bound to the martial logics of Western politics.5 In truth, while the apocalypse can refer to an immense variety of storytelling traditions, in the one specific to Western literature, apocalypse remains exceptionally consistent with the racialized realities of the state of emergency. Fictional appeals to the apocalypse that rely on a state- of- emergency logic are wedded to the exceptionalism of the white settler state. The state of emergency is more often than not the primary political cover for the unequal distribution of resources, the disproportionate deployment of militarized police in fights over fossil fuel extraction, and the uneven consequences of armed occupation. The state of emergency extends, and makes more acute, the political stakes of a literary tradition often only understood to emerge with the same colonial history. As the primary descriptive template for both fictional and factual accounts of accelerating climate chaos, as well as the increasing visibility of white nationalism, the emergency event perniciously endures. The seeming ubiquity of emergency appeals suggests that what Toni Morrison deemed American literature’s “literary whiteness”— where whiteness is consistently, invisibly, implied— applies to spaces beyond the figurative —the racialized realities of the state of emergency lurk in the literary mode of the apocalypse.6 When fixated on the emergency, apocalyptic appeals entrench Western political structures, limiting our landscapes to the narrow slats of settler sovereignty continuously whitewashed in the economies of racial capitalism. Much about the Malheur occupation exemplifies the ways Western apocalyptic appeals erase, embolden, and ultimately acquit the white violences of settler colonial capitalism. The occupation maintained some its most intimate affiliations with the “apocalyptic manhood” of the Far Right, continuing a history of government- militia clashes that stretch from the “apocalypse- minded white separatist” Randall Weaver (of the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident) forward to LaVoy Finicum, CCF spokesman of the Malheur takeover and author of the postapocalyptic novel Only by Blood and Suffering: Regaining Lost Freedom. 7 Finicum’s title substitutes “suffering” for “soil,” thinly disguising its eugenicist dog whistle in part of the plausible deniability created in “the speculative fiction of the paramilitary right.”8 The novel narrates the “standoff at the Apocalypse Ranch of Finicum’s imagination,” a fictional allegory for the apocalyptic fervor fueling fantasies of “the white republic,” to echo Alyosha Goldstein’s characterization of the standoff.9 Lengthening the shadow of Weaver’s legacy with Finicum’s fiction and Ammon Bundy’s claims to divine revelation, the occupation acted out an anointed quest to reclaim white freedom, at once lost and yet still under threat. The Malheur occupiers took further inspiration from two fringe Mormon apocalyptic texts, The Nay Book and the white horse prophecy, two texts that link the occupiers’ apocalyptic habit to the white nationalist innocence secured through the state of emergency.10 Though denounced by the Mormon Church, The Nay Book is a collection compiled by Keith Allen Nay, a Bundy family friend and fellow rancher. It offers religious justification for rejecting federal rule of law through “a scrapbook mix of letters, founding documents of both the United States and the Church of Latter- day Saints of Jesus Christ mixed with ideas that have existed in the antigovernment ‘Patriot’ movement for decades.”11 The book is often associated with the white horse prophecy, a disputed Latter- day Saints text that tells of an imperiled, divinely inspired US Constitution saved by Latter- day Saints elders riding on the white horse of the four horsemen of the apocalypse from the Book of Revelation.12 Both the white horse prophecy and The Nay Book have close ties to the John Birch society, a Far Right white supremacist organization that boasts Fred Koch among its first eleven members. Koch was one of its primary financial backers and the father of the billionaire funders of climate change denial David and Charles Koch, who were themselves John Birchers.13 This network is exemplary of the apocalyptic narrative’s political, racial, and environmental analogs. Within this apocalyptic habitus, the armed Malheur occupiers marshaled the rhetoric of frontier masculinity, anxieties about federal overreach, and subtextual fears of white genocide to bolster declarations of their own sovereign authority over the homelands of the Burns Paiute.14 In their apocalyptic prophecies and state- of- emergency declarations, the occupation performed a type of “settler apocalypse”— stories that tell of the end of the whole world but are, in reality, specific to white settlers.15 While it is important to avoid collapsing all paramilitary activity under the label of white nationalism, it is equally vital to recognize the ways the rhetoric of apocalypse, especially the state of emergency that often defines its logic, works to secure the innocence of its white settler subjects, even as they reject state power.16 That recognition clarifies how the state of emergency, or state of exception, functions as the legal paradigm for a “settler move to innocence,” what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call an “attempt to deflect a settler identity, while continuing to enjoy settler privilege and occupying stolen land.”17 The occupiers were, after all, found innocent. Their acquittal suggests that the blamelessness of settler sovereignty is not merely a story; it is structured into the legal and political landscapes of the settler state. The state of emergency’s white- innocence- making mechanics were thrown into sharp relief by the rhetoric of apocalypse, ongoing emergency, and continuous resistance that circulated at Standing Rock. Standing Rock Sioux leadership shared their prophecy of apocalypse, telling of a time when the Zuzeca Sapa, the black snake, would slither across the earth, poisoning water before destroying the world.18 Recognizing this prophecy in the fossil fuel flowing through the Dakota Access Pipeline, elders, water protectors, and their allies galvanized to defend their people and the other eighteen million living downstream.19 The protests, then, belong to a long narrative tradition guiding Indigenous resistance to the “apocalyptic death worlds of rape, genocide, poaching, trespass, theft, and smallpox” that have always accompanied the extraction economies of the settler state, to follow Nick Estes account in Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline. 20 Estes situates these apocalypses in the broader conditions of Indigenous refusal, because “while the Black Snake prophecy foreshadows doom, it also foreshadows historic resistance and resurgent Indigenous histories.”21 As typical of this dynamic, the #NoDAPL movement surged after “Jack Dalrymple declared a state of emergency on August 19, 2016— to safeguard the pipeline’s final construction.”22 Estes notes that Dalrymple used the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, which grants powers typically reserved for natural disasters but, tellingly, were also deployed in Baltimore “to crush a black- led uprising for justice for Freddie Gray.”23 Pairing #NoDAPL and #BlackLivesMatter, Estes describes, but does not draw out, the state of emergency insulating extraction economies through the creation and maintenance of racialized threats to the settler state. Indeed, in Malheur, Standing Rock, and Baltimore, alike, the state of emergency secures white settler innocence, even or especially amid its fuel- thirsty apocalypses.24 In stark proximal contrast, only a week after Dalrymple’s August 16 declaration, on August 26 the Standing Rock Tribal Council declared a state of emergency to protect their rightful claim to land based on the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty with the United States.25 Soon after, prayerful water protectors were met by state and federal police and privately contracted mercenaries, all clad in riot gear. Drones and planes constantly surveilled; guns scoped over warlike barricades. This spectacle compelled many media outlets to compare the illegal, armed, and violent threats of the Malheur occupation with the unarmed Oceti Sakowin and allies in order to highlight the incommensurable responses from local and federal officials.26 Many called the Bundy occupation an instance of “white terrorism” deserving of a militarized police response.27 Still, only the water protectors at Standing Rock have been charged with terrorism or targeted by the FBI terrorism taskforce.28 These disparities were, and remain, foreseeable.29 They are embedded in the functions and fictions of the state of emergency in the settler state.