A deep overview of the modern history of the militia movement and its kin with William Potter Gale’s creation of the Posse Comitatus.
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Three months after the standoff at the Cliven Bundy ranch, the Southern Poverty Law Center has issued a report—”War in the West: The Bundy Ranch Standoff and the American Radical Right“—stating what should have been obvious at the time, but which most media coverage utterly obscured: The standoff was not some quirky, standalone event that spontaneously just happened out of the blue. Rather, it was a highly coordinated event reflecting the threat of a larger militia movement, which in turn has drawn together multiple threads of far-right ideology over the course of the last 40 years.
On the purely tactical level, the report notes that Bundy’s armed supporters had “overwhelming tactical superiority” due to their pre-positioning on the high ground above the confrontation—under the direction of a Montana militia member and Iraq War veteran—which is a primary reason why the Bureau of Land Management wisely withdrew. On a somewhat broader level, the report warns of the events’ ripple effect. “Just in the months since the Bundy ‘victory,’ tense standoffs between the BLM and antigovernment activists have taken place across the West — in Idaho, New Mexico, Texas and Utah.”
That’s in addition to the violent Las Vegas rampage of Bundy supporters Jerad and Amanda Miller, which left three innocents dead along with the two shooters. And it places these events in a larger context. First in the Obama era—“Since 2009, there have been 17 shooting incidents between antigovernment extremists and law enforcement”—but also beyond. It stretches as far back as the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s, but gaining much more organizational coherence with the confluence of the racist, anti-Semitic Posse Comitatus, starting in the 1970s, and two more mainstream movements, “the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and 1980s and the Wise Use movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s.”
“The Bundy ranch standoff wasn’t a spontaneous response to Cliven Bundy’s predicament but rather a well-organized, military-type action that reflects the potential for violence from a much larger and more dangerous movement,” said Mark Potok, senior fellow in the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, and lead author of the report, in a statement accompanying the report. “This incident may have faded from public view, but if our government doesn’t pay attention, we will be caught off guard as much as the Bureau of Land Management was that day.”
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The report not only provides a broad overview of how violence-prone right-wing anti-government conspiracism and broader land use grievances have interacted since the 1970s, it also provides direct evidence of how Bundy himself has espoused such fringe views throughout his decades-long period of refusing to pay the minimal grazing fees he owes.
But as far-reaching as it is, it is still remarkably focused, Clarkson points out. “The issue in the case of the Bundy grazing fees, is a long standing issue of federal lands in the West. But there are many such potential rallying points for the Patriot movement and its prospective allies, informed by a volatile range of beliefs, many of them religious.”
While the report does mention religion in passing, as Clarkson suggests, there’s a great deal more out there that lies beyond its scope. “In 2001, for example, there was an analogous situation when the Indianapolis Baptist Temple, which had refused to withhold taxes from their employee paychecks, faced the seizure of their assets. Militia groups also turned out to defend the church,” Clarkson said. In a post-Hobby Lobby world, who’s to say what would happen with similar situation today? In that case, however, “law enforcement simply waited until almost everyone had gone home and three months later seized the church without violence,” Clarkson noted. “Not every such standoff need end in violence. But ideological shifts in elements of the Christian Right in recent years, also point to a growing potential if not actual preparation for violence.”
“A much larger and more dangerous movement”: Right-wing militias thrive post-Bundy — and the media won’t talk about it - Salon.com
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