Resurgent Right-Wing Militias

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This article is part of a package on right-wing violence and militias. For a counterpoint from the libertarian magazine Reason, read The Paranoid Center.

In Pensacola, Florida, retired FBI agent Ted Gunderson tells a gathering of antigovernment “Patriots” that the federal government has set up 1,000 internment camps around the country and is storing 30,000 guillotines and 500,000 caskets in Atlanta. He says it’s all for the day when the United States declares martial law and moves in to round up or kill citizen dissenters.

Outside Atlanta, a so-called grand jury issues an “indictment” of Barack Obama for fraud and treason because he wasn’t born in the United States and is illegally occupying the office of president. Other sham “grand juries” around the country follow suit.

In Lexington, Massachusetts, where the opening shots of the Revolutionary War were fired in 1775, members of Oath Keepers, a newly formed group of law enforcement officers, military personnel, and veterans convene on April 19 to reaffirm a pledge to defend the U.S. Constitution. The date of the gathering is highly significant: It’s not only the anniversary of that “shot heard round the world,” it also marks the 1993 conflagration at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and the lethal bombing two years later of the Oklahoma City federal building—all seminal events in the lore of the extreme right. “We’re in perilous times . . . perhaps far more perilous than in 1775,” says the man administering the oath.

Almost 10 years after the militia movement seemed to disappear from American life, there are unmistakable signs of a revival. From Idaho to New Jersey and from Michigan to Florida, men and women in khaki and camouflage are back in the woods, gathering to practice the paramilitary skills they believe will be needed to fend off the socialistic troops of the storied New World Order.

Paper terrorism—the use of property liens, bogus legal documents, and “citizens’ grand juries” to attack enemies and, sometimes, reap illegal fortunes—is proliferating. As a result, the government has set up special efforts to rein in so-called “tax defiers” and to track threats against judges. At the same time, Patriot fears about the government are being amplified by a loud new group of ostensibly mainstream media personalities and politicians, from Fox News commentator Glenn Beck to Michele Bachmann, a member of Congress from Minnesota.

The situation has many authorities worried. Militiamen, white supremacists, anti-Semites, nativists, tax protesters, and a range of other activists of the radical right are cross-pollinating and may even be coalescing. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that 50 new militia training groups have sprung up in less than two years. Sales of guns and ammunition have skyrocketed amid fears of new gun control laws, much as they did in the 1990s.

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