Something has been lost
Dalton Mattus is the personification of American Doom, a normal man radicalized, who shows how small town America is often taken by right-wing authoritarianism.
As prominent national media continue to largely fail to take authoritarian threats to democracy seriously, news broke this week that Media Matters has been forced to lay off staff under legal pressure from far-right billionaire Elon Musk and Republican attorneys general. Authoritarian right-wingers like Musk and the vast majority of the Republican party understand that a free and independent press threatens their ability to engage in minority rule over hundreds of millions of Americans who don’t agree with their policies.
We’re a very small shop here at American Doom — just myself and Bree Zender — but we’re the only publication exposing local election denial officials who are poised to aid in Donald Trump’s efforts to call November’s election into question. That’s in addition to our work investigating right-wing extremists like the man we wrote about last week.
For as little as $4 a month, you can support these efforts at a critical time when independent journalism is more important than ever.
On March 24, the city of Pekin, Illinois posted an update to its official Facebook page in an attempt to quash rumors that the city was housing “anywhere from hundreds to thousands of illegal immigrants.” The rumors were not true, but they’d spread so much that citizens had inundated city staff and their state representatives with complaints, outraged at the prospect of undocumented immigrants being housed in their community.
“The City of Pekin is not participating in any federally funded or state funded programs to house illegal immigrants,” the post read. “Further, there has been no substantiated factual information to indicate any illegal immigrants have been bussed here or are being housed within our community.”
I don’t know where the rumors came from and I don’t really care — surely someone, somewhere whose Facebook feed looks like the type of radicalizing madness that I’ve written about so much here saw something that made them think undocumented immigrants were being held in Pekin. Or, if the comments on the city’s post are any indication, some Pekinite simply saw someone they assumed to be Mexican at Walmart and decided that they must be there because the city was helping them.
It doesn’t really matter where the rumor started because the result is the same: fear and anger. That includes people like Dalton Mattus, the 34-year-old now under arrest in Pekin for possessing a handful of pipe bombs and who I discovered was prolifically posting about right-wing conspiracies and other anti-government content for the past few years.
Mattus is a poster child for the exact type of right-wing radicalization that American Doom covers . As we were sitting around discussing the response to last week'’s story about Mattus, my wife concluded that he’s the personification of American Doom. “He is American Doom,” she told me.
Mattus is American Doom because he’s an otherwise relatively normal guy who no doubt loves his country but has a completely warped sense of what threatens it. I’m from Peoria, not far from Pekin. I love my hometown just like I love a lot about small town America. But small town America has been manipulated and taken advantage of to the point that it might be beyond repair, politically speaking. This is why Mattus’ story is so important — I don’t hate people like him. In fact, I wish that I could help to bring them back to a reality in which we have the shared ideals we used to have — before Trump, before the hysteria of the algorithm began dragging people into extremist depths. Like many of the people I write about here, I share a desire to simply be left alone and to live my life. I don’t want to be told what to do by the government or law enforcement. Mostly, what I’d like to do, is hang out in the country and keep to myself, go fishing, get a truck stuck, putz around and work on projects in a garage, watch my dogs run in the woods. In this way, I’m not at all dissimilar to people like Mattus. But I also don’t want to feel like I’m going to get blown away one day by someone like him who believes I’m a threat simply because I have different political beliefs.
Mattus went from never posting about politics to being completely consumed by it as racial protests and the pandemic took hold in 2020. From there it was on to QAnon, anti-immigrant sentiment, election denial, and insane anti-government conspiracies. People like Mattus are the actual threat to the safety and security of this country — not the shadowy forces he believes are controlling things.
In a way, Mattus’ story is the story of all of us. We’ve lost something in these last 10 years that I don’t know if we’re going to get back. The only way to save us is to save ourselves, but we can’t even agree that we are a thing anymore. Everything is us and them. The most truthful thing Mattus said among his hundreds of vitriolic posts is right up at the top of this column: We are not OK.
For four years now I’ve been exposing election officials who believe many of the same things Mattus does. I’ve been writing for anyone who will listen that the mass radicalization toward the far-right that we saw in 2020 was just a beginning. People like Mattus haven’t gotten less fired up in the last four years. Instead, their fear and anger has metastasized into an all-encompassing belief system that threatens to bring widespread political violence in November and afterward. I can only hope that the right people are listening to these warnings.
***
P.S. In the coming weeks, I’ll have an update on election denial madness in Spalding County, Georgia where a QAnon believer and full-throated election denier remains in charge of the board of elections.
If you’re a free subscriber to American Doom, please consider a paid subscription to support this work.
This is the only place you’ll find it.