7

The Cultural Limits of Bigotry

I am not racist.

—Diane Fedele, president of a Republican women’s club in California

David Marsters, a retired police officer, was fed up with Barack

Obama. “One man ruined the whole country,” Marsters declared by

phone a few days after being interrogated by the Secret Service. “I

voted for him the first time. He’s conned everybody in the nation that

he’s gonna change this or change that.”

But the only change that Marsters saw from his rural town in Maine

was a shift toward the revolting, which he watched through the peculiar

lenses of Fox News, Glenn Beck, and other right-wing polemicists.

“It’s getting disgusting, the whole country,” Marsters said. “He’s given

away the country—food stamps, all that. Nobody wants to work

anymore. He always blames everybody else.” And Obama “was

blowing smoke from marijuana” during the first presidential debate in

2012, Marsters imagined. “He was high as a kite. With Romney. That’s

what I feel. I got a right to my feelings.”

Indeed he does. He also has a right to his speech, which he exercised in

a galvanizing way in late August 2013. As the rest of his disgusting

country was marking the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washing-

ton and hearing again the ringing cadence of Martin Luther King Jr.’s

inspiring call, “I have a dream,” a different phrase altogether came to

David Marsters, and he did not keep it to himself.

Before his line is quoted, Marsters should be allowed to make his case:

“I’m not prejudiced against blacks or anything. We have many black

friends.” A black Baptist church was his place of worship, in the

Roxbury section of Boston, before he and his wife moved to Maine.

“We traveled twenty miles to go to church,” he said, and loved it, at

least as a social spectacle. “The service would last four to five hours, all

great people. They had a band there, jambalaya, dancing around. They

knew how to live. Their kids were very well trained, sat there for four

or five hours, all well dressed.”

This shield of non-racism did not protect him. It was quickly pierced by

three words, which he posted on his Facebook page with a link to a

Republican congressman’s call for Obama’s impeachment. “Shoot the

nigger,” Marsters wrote. Imagine. While much of the country was

thinking, “I have a dream,” Marsters was typing, “Shoot the nigger.”

The landscape of free speech is vast in America, but there are bound-

aries, often invisible to the unwitting, who trip over the unseen taboos

and then fall, bewildered, into disrepute. The list of the self-wounded is

long enough, and prominent enough, to suggest that despite all that the

society has learned about the traditional patterns of stereotyping, there

are plenty of tone-deaf Americans. They do not hear themselves. They

do not recognize the old, unpleasant discords of prejudice in their

remarks, their jokes, their accusations. They surely believe what they

say: that they are not racist, not anti-Semitic, not biased along the lines

of ethnicity or religion. Often they are sincerely stunned when their

innocent words, lighthearted words, strong words, yes, but principled

words of legitimate criticism, are turned around and used to brand them

as bigots.

Marsters felt the repercussions immediately. He was a relative new-

comer who had come just three years earlier, at the age of sixty-five,

from Malden, Massachusetts, to the village of Sabattus, which straddles

the Maine Turnpike south of Augusta. He noticed, with annoyance, that

Sabattus residents who were not willing to serve in town offices were

nonetheless “the first to bitch,” so he volunteered and was seated on the

Ordinance Review Committee, the Budget Committee, and the Charter

Commission.

Amid a rash of home break-ins, he made a stir by proposing a law that

would have required every household to own a gun; it was voted down.

He also set his sights on a run for selectman. All this made him a quasi-

public figure, ripe for unwelcome press coverage, all the way from the

Bangor Daily News to the New York Daily News, when his terse

remedy for the Obama problem went up on Facebook.

First, the local government forced him to resign from the commit- tees,

with the town manager, Andrew Gilmore, calling his Facebook remark

“deplorably hateful, dangerous, and exactly opposite of all this country

and the town of Sabattus stands for.”

Then, Marsters recalled, “My police department where I live called me

up and [said], Dave, come down at two o’clock. We want to talk to you

about it.” When he walked into the office, in the one-story, cream-

colored municipal building, he saw “a guy there with civilian clothes

on. I knew he was Secret Service. I’m a retired cop, and I can smell

’em a mile away . . . He’s a young kid, fresh out of the academy,

stationed up here in Maine.”

The fledgling agent was obviously interested in only one of the two

components of the Facebook post—not the racist epithet, but the appar-

ent threat. “It’s against the law to threaten the president of the United

States,” Marsters acknowledged. “People took it as a threat. I talked to

many people who didn’t take it as a threat,” and he said he didn’t mean

it literally. He meant “do something about it. Impeach him . . . They’ve

been trying to get rid of him. They’ve been talking about it for two

years now.” In the immediate clarity of hindsight, he called his typed

sentence a “slip of the finger.”

The agent issued Marsters the Miranda warning about his rights to

silence and counsel and asked Marsters for his name, his date of birth,

his children’s names and addresses, his educational background, and

his military service. “Have you ever been to Washington, D.C.?”

Marsters remembered being asked. “Did you ever go to any rallies for

Obama?” No. “Ever go to rallies around here for Obama?” No. He took

Marsters’s picture and asked for consent to search his house for

weapons.

The retired cop knew the routine very well, and he gave consent,

thereby waiving his Fourth Amendment right against a search without

probable cause, which would have required the agent to get a warrant

from a judge. Marsters told the agent up front that he had one weapon,

a handgun. “I showed it to him before he searched the house,” Marsters

said, and then, accompanied by local police, “he searched the house for

more weapons.”

He found nothing else and left the gun. “I had a concealed weapons

permit,” Marsters said. “Three days later the chief of police wrote me a

letter and revoked it, said I was not of good character.”

The Secret Service agent interviewed his wife and neighbors and

required Marsters to sign an affidavit stating that he had not been

hospitalized for mental illness and was not taking drugs for any

psychological ailment. He told Marsters that the agency would check,

and “if you lied, we’ll come back to you again.”

As a former law enforcement officer, Marsters voiced no complaint.

“They have to do their job, that’s how I figure,” he said. “They took it

as a threat. The town manager took it as a threat, the police chief took it

as a threat, the sheriff took it as a threat.” But Marsters wasn’t worried.

“They can’t find a black mark against me. I never had a parking ticket,

haven’t been arrested, was a cop, thirty years in the military.”

Under federal law, it takes less to activate an investigation into threat-

ening words against the president than it does, say, against your boss or

your neighbor. Pure speech, even ugly speech, is protected by the First

Amendment unless it crosses limits into criminal conspiracy or incite-

ment. So police departments usually don’t act on stated threats alone

without accompanying action that rises to the level of harassment or

imminent danger.

The president, however, enjoys special protection under the statute,

which states, “Whoever knowingly and willfully [makes] any threat to

take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President

of the United States . . . shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not

more than five years, or both.”

But what constitutes a threat? The Secret Service uses a three-pronged

test before bringing charges: Agents must determine that the person in

question actually made the statement, did so “knowingly and willfully,”

and meant it as a true threat. No proof is needed that the individual

intended to carry it out.

“The Secret Service is interested in legitimate information relating to

threats, plans or attempts by individuals, groups or organizations to

harm Secret Service protectees,” the agency says on its website.

“However, the agency does not desire or solicit information pertaining

to individuals or groups expressing legitimate criticism of, or political

opposition to, the policies and decisions of the government or

government officials.” Marsters portrayed himself as fitting into that

second category. “It wasn’t very appropriate,” he admitted, but he

wasn’t really calling for violence. The Secret Service didn’t seem to

think so, either, because in the following months—after the agent told

him that a report would be made to higher officials in the agency—no

further questioning occurred and no charges were brought. “They’ll be

keeping an eye on me,” Marsters figured. “They’ll watch me for a

while.” Would it affect his behavior? “No, I say what I want.” And he

didn’t feel alone, because he’d tapped into a small subculture of like-

minded Americans, some of whom had called him from far and wide

offering to donate to his defense fund, should he need one. “These are

high people, too,” he said cryptically, refusing to name them.

Excerpted from FREEDOM OF SPEECH by

David Shipler. Copyright © 2015 by David

Shipler. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a

division of Random House LLC. All rights

reserved. No part of this excerpt may be

reproduced or reprinted without permission in

writing from the publisher.