A recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) says “right-wing militias, ideologically driven tax defiers and sovereign citizens are appearing in large numbers around the country.” It is a situation that had nearly faded away after the 21st Century began to blossom.
But, now they’re back in the form of what is being called the Patriot movement.
The report says “once-popular militia conspiracy theories are making the rounds again.” These include a secret Mexican plan to take back the American southwest.
A law enforcement group has found 50 new militia training groups, one of them made up of present and former police officers and soldiers.
Why the difference? Why have they again taken root? The SPLC says in its report “the key difference now, is that the federal government, viewed by the entire radical right as its enemy, is headed by a black man.”
A high level of non-white immigration and a decline of the percentage of whites in America has helped racialize the Patriot movement, the SPLC says.
It adds that in the past the movement was not moved by race hate.
Now race hate has spawned, what SPLC has called “a remarkable rash of domestic terror incidents since the presidential campaign, most of them related to anger over the election of Barack Obama.”
Some 15 years ago the SPLC warned then-Attorney General Janet Reno that the “mixture of armed groups and those who hate” was “a recipe for disaster.”
Six months later the Oklahoma Federal Building was bombed.
The report continues that in Pensacola, Fla., a retired FBI agent named Ted Gunderson told a group of Patriots that the federal government has set up a thousand internment camps across the country and are storing 30,000 guillotines and 500,000 caskets in Atlanta. Why? For the day the government finally declares martial law and moves in to round up or kill American dissenters, he said, and added, “They’re going to keep track of all of us.”
Then there was a so-called “American Grand Jury” that issued an “indictment” of Barack Obama for fraud and treason because, the panel said, he wasn’t born in the United States and is illegally serving as president.
Though it all sounds silly, it isn’t silly. In fact, many authorities worry about militiamen, white supremacists, anti-Semites, nativists, tax protesters and many more of the radical rightists.
“You’re seeing the bubbling [of antigovernment sentiment] right now,” said Bart McEntire. McEntire has infiltrated racist hate groups and is now the supervisory special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Roanoke, Va.
He warned, “You see people buying into what they’re saying. It’s primed to grow. The only thing you don’t have to set it on fire is a Waco or Ruby Ridge.”
But the antigovernment bubbling has already seen violence from the radical right accelerating.
Most of the recent murders and plots are probably prompted by Obama’s election, the SPLC says.
One man who said he was “very upset” with the election of Obama was building a radioactive “dirty bomb.”
A Marine was planning to assassinate Obama, as were two racist skinheads in Tennessee.
Another person angry after the election, and said to be interested in joining a militia, killed two sheriff’s deputies in Florida.
A man in Pittsburgh who was afraid of Jews and gun confiscations killed three police officers.
A white man near Boston, allegedly angered by reported “genocide” of his race shot to death two African immigrants and intended to kill as many Jews as possible.
The so-called sovereign citizens movement subscribes to an ideology originated by the anti-Semitic Posse Comitatus of the late 1980s. The group claims that whites are a higher kind of citizen. They are subject to “common law,” not dictates of the government.
But, blacks are only “14th Amendment citizens,” who must obey their government “masters.”
One Michigan “sovereign citizen” has been arrested because he placed bogus liens on property owned by courthouse officials and police officers to harass them and ruin their credit.
Because of the scams the U.S. Marshals Service has initiated a clearinghouse to assess risks to court personnel.
Those incidents include telephone and written threats against federal judges and prosecutors as well as bomb threats and biochemical incidents.
Some 1,278 incidents were logged in 2008 and they expect them to perhaps double in 2009,
I am worried. We see elected government leaders and mainstream media falling for the stupidity of the anti-government movement. Lawmakers in about three dozen states, complaining of what they call federal government intrusion, have introduced resolutions regarding the 10th Amendment which says powers not granted to the federal government remain with the states.
In Texas, Gov. Rick Perry suggested secession several months after Obama’s inauguration.
U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachman a Republican from Minnesota said she feared the president was planning “reeducation camps for young people.”
U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus an Alabama Republican warned of 17 “socialists” in Congress. And our friend Glenn Beck on Fox News has called Obama a Fascist, a Nazi and a Marxist. Beck is obviously incapable of knowing that only Glenn Beck can belong to all three beliefs at once. He also brought back militia conspiracy theories of the 1990s claiming a secret network of government-run concentration camps.
Since the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995, 75 plots, conspiracies and racist rampages have been noted.
They include a plot to blow up the Internal Revenue Service building in Austin, Texas. Later in 1995 an Amtrak passenger train was derailed by saboteurs in Hydern, Ariz.
In November Oklahoma Constitutional Militia leader Willie Ray Lampley, his wife Cedilia and another man were arrested while preparing explosives to bomb numerous targets including the Southern Poverty Law Center, gay bars and abortion clinics.
Finally that year an IRS employee found a plastic drum packed with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil in a parking lot behind the IRS building in Reno, Nev. Ten days later, tax protester Joseph Martin Bailie was sentenced to federal prison and is expected to be released in 2027.
That’s just half of the first year after the Oklahoma bombing.
And, you know something, the perpetrators of these ludicrous crimes are lucky to live in the nation in which they live.
In many other nations, instead of being incarcerated after a trial, those criminals would be keelhauled, dismembered, drowned or executed before any kind of trial.
How lucky is the right wing that it lives in this nation, a nation of free speech, free religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
And how unlucky are the rest of us to have to put up with the right wing, even though we are happy to grant them those four freedoms, as long as they behave.
Carl Keith Greene is a writer for the Times-Tribune. He can be reached at cgreene@thetimestribune.com
