There was shootout last week between police officers in Louisiana and what appear to be seven individuals associated with the sovereign citizens movement. It’s the most recent tragedy in a string of anti-government attacks by followers of the ideology including Jared Loughner’s shooting spree last year. As Barry Goldwater once famously quipped, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”. Posse comitatus and the sovereign citizens movement should probably be viewed as an exception to Barry’s rule.
This latest attack resulted in two dead and two wounded officers in a pair of sequential shootouts starting in the parking lot of an oil refinery. Two members of the group were also wounded. One of them was a member of the notorious white supremacist-infested “posse comitatus”:
TPM
Louisiana Ambush Suspect Tied To ‘Anti-Government Group’Nick R. Martin August 17, 2012, 5:50 PM
A year ago, he was wanted by Nebraska authorities for allegedly making “terroristic threats” to law enforcement.
By Friday, investigators said Kyle Joekel, 28, was one of seven people involved in what was being described as a pair of ambushes on sheriff’s deputies outside of New Orleans. Two deputies were killed and two others wounded before it all came to an end early Thursday morning.
According to a report by the Shreveport Times, investigators in Louisiana had Joekel on their radar for months before the shooting and believed he was part of some sort of “anti-government group.”
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The details of the incident were not immediately clear on Friday afternoon, but the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that the sheriff of Gage County believed Joekel was part of a group known as Posse Comitatus. The group, which was largely active in the 1970s and 80s, was seen as the precursor to the sovereign citizens movement.
“It just didn’t look right,” Sheriff Millard “Gus” Gustafson told the newspaper. “These guys would be driving around at night, and they’d have weapons on the front seat. If you’re doing that, something’s wrong — you’re either hunting illegally or doing something else.”
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Posse comitatus, a far-right anti-tax/anti-government movement that doesn’t recognize legal authority above the level of county sheriff, is an especially important radical movement to understand within the context of the current economic crisis and the financial sector looting that led up to it. It emerged in the 1970’s and 80’s in rural America as a farming crisis displaced and dislocated rural communities. Not only was it a predecesor to the sovereign citizens movement and the larger collection of survivalist-oriented, anti-tax/IRS, Christian Identity far-right white spremacist underground that exists today. It was also a trailblazer in “paper terrorism” and some very strange legal theories:
The Washington Monthly
Too Weird
for The Wire
May/June/July 2008How black Baltimore drug dealers are
using white supremacist legal
theories to confound the Feds.By Kevin Carey
In November 16, 2005, Willie “Bo” Mitchell and three co-defendants—Shelton “Little Rock” Harris, Shelly “Wayne” Martin, and Shawn Earl Gardner— appeared for a hearing in the modern federal courthouse in downtown Baltimore, Maryland. The four African American men were facing federal charges of racketeering, weapons possession, drug dealing, and five counts of first-degree murder. For nearly two years the prosecutors had been methodically building their case, with the aim of putting the defendants to death. In Baltimore, which has a murder rate eight times higher than that of New York City, such cases are depressingly commonplace.
A few minutes after 10 a.m., United States District Court Judge Andre M. Davis took his seat and began his introductory remarks. Suddenly, the leader of the defendants, Willie Mitchell, a short, unremarkable looking twenty-eight-yearold with close-cropped hair, leapt from his chair, grabbed a microphone, and launched into a bizarre soliloquy.
“I am not a defendant,” Mitchell declared. “I do not have attorneys.” The court “lacks territorial jurisdiction over me,” he argued, to the amazement of his lawyers. To support these contentions, he cited decades-old acts of Congress involving the abandonment of the gold standard and the creation of the Federal Reserve. Judge Davis, a Baltimore-born African American in his late fifties, tried to interrupt. “I object,” Mitchell repeated robotically. Shelly Martin and Shelton Harris followed Mitchell to the microphone, giving the same speech verbatim. Their attorneys tried to intervene, but when Harris’s lawyer leaned over to speak to him, Harris shoved him away.
Judge Davis ordered the three defendants to be removed from the court, and turned to Gardner, who had, until then, remained quiet. But Gardner, too, intoned the same strange speech. “I am Shawn Earl Gardner, live man, flesh and blood,” he proclaimed. Every time the judge referred to him as “the defendant” or “Mr. Gardner,” Gardner automatically interrupted: “My name is Shawn Earl Gardner, sir.” Davis tried to explain to Gardner that his behavior was putting his chances of acquittal or leniency at risk. “Don’t throw your life away,” Davis pleaded. But Gardner wouldn’t stop. Judge Davis concluded the hearing, determined to find out what was going on.
As it turned out, he wasn’t alone. In the previous year, nearly twenty defendants in other Baltimore cases had begun adopting what lawyers in the federal courthouse came to call “the flesh-and-blood defense.” The defense, such as it is, boils down to this: As officers of the court, all defense lawyers are really on the government’s side, having sworn an oath to uphold a vast, century-old conspiracy to conceal the fact that most aspects of the federal government are illegitimate, including the courts, which have no constitutional authority to bring people to trial. The defendants also believed that a legal distinction could be drawn between their name as written on their indictment and their true identity as a “flesh and blood man.”
Judge Davis and his law clerk pored over the case files, which led them to a series of strange Web sites. The fleshand- blood defense, they discovered, came from a place far from Baltimore, from people as different from Willie Mitchell as people could possibly be. Its antecedents stretched back decades, involving religious zealots, gun nuts, tax protestors, and violent separatists driven by theories that had fueled delusions of Aryan supremacy and race war in gun-loaded compounds in the wilds of Montana and Idaho. Although Mitchell and his peers didn’t know it, they were inheriting the intellectual legacy of white supremacists who believe that America was irrevocably broken when the 14th Amendment provided equal rights to former slaves. It was the ideology that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing, the biggest act of domestic terrorism in the nation’s history, and now, a decade later, it had somehow sprouted in the crime-ridden ghettos of Baltimore.
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Note that these ideas that the US constitution negates virtually all federal laws (and most other laws) are found in the youtube videos made by Jared Loughner...along with a strange grammer obsession. Loughner sort of puts a new spin on the term “grammer nazi”.
Skipping down in the article...
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A month after the hearing, Judge Davis took the unusual step of issuing a written opinion denying all of the defendant’s “unusual—if not bizarre” arguments. “Perhaps they would even be humorous,” Davis wrote, “were the stakes not so high … It is truly ironic that four African- American defendants here apparently rely on an ideology derived from a famously discredited notion: the illegitimacy of the Fourteenth Amendment.” One can understand his incredulity that four Baltimore drug dealers might invoke a racist argument that dates back to the nineteenth century. But as it turns out, that’s when the seeds of the flesh-and-blood defense were sown.
In 1878, southern Democrats pushed legislation through Congress limiting the ability of the federal government to marshal troops on U.S. soil. Known as Posse Comitatus, (Latin for “power of the county”) the law’s authors hoped to constrain the government’s ability to protect black southerners from violence and discrimination. The act symbolically marked the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of Jim Crow.
For the next eight decades, black Americans lived under the yoke of institutional racism. But by the late 1950s, the civil rights movement was growing in strength. In 1957, President Eisenhower sent 1,200 troops from the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas, so that nine black students could safely enter a previously all-white high school. The landmark Civil Rights Act followed in 1964.
These developments horrified one William Gale, a World War II veteran, insurance salesman, self-styled minister of racist Christian Identity theology, and raving anti-Semite. In 1971, he launched a movement whose impact would reverberate through the radical fringes of American society for decades to come. He called it Posse Comitatus, named for the 1878 law he believed Eisenhower had violated by sending the troops to Little Rock. In a series of tapes and self-published pamphlets, Gale explained that county sheriffs were the supreme legal law enforcement officers in the land, and that county residents had the right to form a posse to enforce the Constitution—however they, as “sovereign citizens,” chose to interpret it. Public officials who interfered, instructed Gale, should be “hung by the neck” at high noon.
Gale’s racist beliefs were hardly unique. His singular innovation was to devise a “legal” philosophy that was enormously appealing to disaffected, alienated citizens. It was a promise of power, a means of asserting that they were the true inheritors of the founding fathers’ ideal, a dream they believed had been corrupted by a vast conspiracy that only they could see. Gale’s ideas gave people on the paranoid edge of society a collective identity. It told them what they desperately wanted to hear: that the federal government was illegitimate, and that the legal weapons the state used to oppress them could be turned against the state.
Soon, Posses were sprouting across the country, attracting veterans of the 1960s-era tax protest movement, Second Amendment absolutists, Christian Identity adherents, and ardent anti-communists who had abandoned the John Birch Society because they felt the organization wasn’t extreme enough. Local groups would meet to share literature, listen to tapes of Gale’s sermons, and discuss preparations for the approaching End Times. This extremist stew produced exotic amalgamations of paranoia, such as when Posse members would explain the need for local militias to stockpile weapons in order to defend white Christians from blacks in the coming race war sparked by the inevitable economic collapse caused by the income tax and a cabal of international Jewish bankers bent on global dominance through one world government, for Satan.
While local Posses would periodically confront law enforcement officials in the 1970s, (usually in property disputes), they were often incompetent, and few people were hurt. But things took a serious turn in 1978, when thousands of farmers rallied in Washington D.C. seeking relief from low commodity prices, high interest rates, and farm debt. When Congressional relief attempts failed, some farmers became susceptible to peddlers of the Posse ideology, which preached that the farm crisis had been brought on by the international Jewish banking conspiracy, abandonment of the gold standard and a malevolent Federal Reserve.
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It’s an important lesson we can learn from the rise of posse comitatus in the 70’s and 80’s: When governments fail to address the economic troubles facing their citizens, those citizens tend to become much more amenable to extreme nationalism and conspiracy theories, especially the existing legacy conspiracy theories of a cabal of international jewish bankers. One lesson we can take away from this is that any movement that wants to promote such theories/worldviews has an incentive to destroy the economy in order to radicalize the populace. It’s a lesson the public really needs to learn in the context of a global recession brought on by an international financial crisis because the banks haven’t been the only sectors of society bailed out in the wake of the financial crisis. A number of bankrupt political ideologies have also been bailed out by the government’s kid glove treatment of the financial sector after the obscene behavior by the banksters.
Continuing...
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By 1982, Bill Gale had flown to Kansas to conduct paramilitary training and indoctrination for splinter groups of disaffected farmers. At night, a country music station in Dodge City broadcast tapes of Gale’s sermons. “You’re either going to get back to the Constitution of the United States in your government,” he intoned, “or officials are gonna hang by the neck until they’re dead … Arise and fight! If a Jew comes near you, run a sword through him.” As Posse ideology rippled across the distressed farm belt, violence followed. Several deadly confrontations between Posse adherents and law enforcement made national headlines; Geraldo Rivera descended on Nebraska to document the “Seeds of Hate” in America’s heartland. By 1987, Gale’s rhetoric had escalated further. He told his followers that “You’ve got an enemy government running around … its source and its location is Washington, D.C., and the federal buildings they’ve built with your tax money all over the cities in this land.”Hucksters and charlatans prowled the Midwest as the farm crisis deepened, selling desperate farmers expensive seminars and prepackaged legal defenses “guaranteed” to cancel debts and forestall foreclosure. Since the gold standard had been abandoned in 1933, they argued, money had no inherent value, and so neither did their debts. All they had to do, farmers were told, was opt out of the system by sending a letter to the appropriate authorities renouncing their driver’s license, birth certificate, and social security number. That number was allegedly tied to a secret government account held in a secure subterranean facility in lower Manhattan, where citizens are used as collateral against international debts issued by the Fed and everyone’s name is on a master list, spelled in capital letters—the very same capital letters used in the official court documents detailing foreclosure and other actions against them. The capital letter name was nothing but an artificial construct, they were told, a legal “straw man.” It wasn’t them—natural, live, flesh and blood men.
Bill Gale died on April 28, 1988, three months after being sentenced in federal court for conspiracy, tax crimes, and mailing death threats to the Internal Revenue Service. By that time, the farm crisis had begun to recede. Posse ideology simmered for the next few years, morphing into the “Christian Patriot” movement, which sanded down some of the roughest racist and anti-Semitic edges while retaining the core beliefs of Constitutional fundamentalism. The patriots saw themselves as “sovereign citizens,” unlike the “federal citizens” who had been created by the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.
The deadly confrontations between federal agents and extremists at Ruby Ridge in 1992 and Waco, Texas in 1993 brought latent anger with the federal government back to a boil. The militia movement of the 1990s built on Posse tenets of county- based, self-organized paramilitary groups led by citizens expressing their basic Constitutional rights. Most groups stuck with conducting survivalist training camps and filing bogus liens against houses owned by local judges. But a few did much more.
In 1993, a Michigan farmer and survivalist named James Nichols was pulled over for speeding. Instead of simply paying the fine, he argued in court that his “sovereign citizen” status made him immune to prosecution. That same year, James’ brother Terry tried to pay off a $17,000 debt with a fake check issued by a radical “family farm preservation” group run by Posse adherents. Two years later, Terry Nichols helped to bring the Posse’s anti-government hatred to its ultimate fruition. On April 18, 1995, he and a friend named Timothy McVeigh loaded 108 fifty-pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer into a Ryder truck. The next day, McVeigh bombed the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people on the second anniversary of Waco.
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As the above article indicates, posse comitatus is rooted in the desire to establish a white-supremacist god-ordained utopia of constitutionally mandated really really really small government. And no Jewish bankers. It’s sort of early version for the broader spectrum of militant far-right movements we’ve seen exploding across the US over the last couple of decades, including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and his direct co-conspirators. Think of the posse comitatus worldview as sort of the John Birch Society viewed through the lens of a militant hyper-Libertarian Christian Identity neo-nazi. They’re pretty extreme but also somewhat prototypical for the hardcore ‘Patriot’ scene:
Cursor.org
Rush, Newspeak
and Fascism:
An exegesisby David Neiwert
POSTED AUGUST 30, 2003 —
V. Proto-Fascism in America
by David Neiwert
It’s clear by now, I hope, that fascism isn’t something peculiar to Europe, but in fact grew out of an impulse that appears throughout history in many different cultures. This impulse is, as Roger Griffin puts it, “ultra-nationalism that aspires to bring about the renewal of a nation’s entire political culture.”
We needn’t look far to find this impulse at play in the American landscape — social, religious and political renewal all appear as constant (though perhaps not yet dominant) themes of Republican propaganda now. But it is especially prevalent on the extremist right; indeed, it’s probably a definitive trait.
Griffin argues that current-day fascism is “groupuscular” in nature — that is, it forms out of smallish but virulent, potentially lethal and certainly problematic “organisms”:
After the war the dank conditions for revolutionary nationalism “dried out” to a point where it could no longer form into a single-minded slime mould. Since party-political space was largely closed to it, even in its diminutive versions, it moved increasingly into disparate niches within civic and uncivic space, often assuming a “metapolitical” mode in which it focussed on changing the “cultural hegemony” of the dominant liberal capitalist system. … Where revolutionary nationalism pursued violent tactics they were no longer institutionalised and movement-based, but of a sporadic, anarchic, and terroristic nature. To the uninitiated observer it seemed that where once planets great and small of ultra-nationalist energies had dominated the skies, there now circled an asteroid belt of fragments, mostly invisible to the naked eye.19
When we consider some of the other historical traits of fascism, including those it shares with other forms of totalitarianism, then it becomes much easier to identify the political factions that are most clearly proto-fascist — that is, potentially fascist, if not explicitly so. (As Paxton argues, its latent expression will not necessarily represent its mature form.) Surveying the American scene, it is clear that just such a movement already exists. And in fact, it had already inspired, before 9/11, the most horrendous terrorist attack ever on American soil. It calls itself the “Patriot” movement.
You may have heard that this movement is dead. It isn’t, quite yet. And its potential danger to the American way of life is still very much with us.
Those who have read In God’s Country know that I conclude, in the Afterword, that the Patriot movement represents a genuine proto-fascist element: “a uniquely American kind of fascism.” Let’s explore this point in a little more detail.
As Griffin suggests, the “groupuscular” form that postwar fascism has taken seems to pose little threat, but it remains latent in the woodwork:
But the danger of the groupuscular right is not only at the level of the challenge to “cultural hegemony”. Its existence as a permanent, practically unsuppressible ingredient of civil and uncivil society also ensures the continued “production” of racists and fanatics. On occasion these are able to subvert democratic, pacifist opposition to globalisation, as has been seen when they have infiltrated the “No Logo” movement with a revolutionary, violent dynamic all too easily exploited by governments to tar all protesters with the same brush. Others choose instead to pursue the path of entryism by joining mainstream reformist parties, thus ensuring that both mainstream conservative parties and neo-populist parties contain a fringe of ideologically “prepared” hard-core extremists. Moreover, while the semi-clandestine groupuscular form now adopted by hard-core activist and metapolitical fascism cannot spawn the uniformed paramilitary cadres of the 1930s, it is ideally suited to breeding lone wolf terrorists and self-styled “political soldiers” in trainers and bomber-jackets dedicated to a tactic of subversion known in Italian as “spontaneism”. [Emphasis mine] By reading the rationalised hate that they find on their screens as a revelation they transform their brooding malaise into a sense of mission and turn the servers of their book-marked web groupuscules into their masters.
Griffin identifies this manifestation of fascism not only in Europe but in the United States:
One of the earliest such acts of terrorism on record harks back to halcyon pre-PC days. When Kohler Gundolf committed the Oktoberfest bombing in 1980 it was initially attributed to a “nutter” working independently of the organised right. Yet it later transpired that he had been a member of the West German groupuscule, Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann. It also emerged at the trial of the “Oklahoma bomber”, Timothy McVeigh, that he had been deeply influenced by the USA’s thriving groupuscular right subculture. His disaffection with the contemporary state of the nation had been politicised by his exposure to the shadowy revolutionary subculture created by the patriotic militias, rifle clubs and survivalists. In particular, his belief that he had been personally called to do something to break ZOG’s (the so-called Zionist Occupation Government) stranglehold on America had crystallised into a plan on reading The Turner Diaries by William Pierce, head of the National Alliance.20
Conservatives have successfully re-airbrushed the Oklahoma City bombing as the act of a single maniac (or two) rather than the piece of right-wing terrorism it was, derived wholly from an ideological stew of venomous hate that has simultaneously been seeping into mainstream conservatism throughout the 1990s and since.
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HN
Note that the 1980 Oktoberfest bombing in Munich was reviewed in 2011 and the bomber was indeed part of a larger neo-nazi network but the investigators intentionally ignored these links and pushed the ‘lone wolf’ story in order to avoid the political fall out for the German right-wing. It’s a phenomena frequently found (often upon later investigations) ‘into the many ‘lone wolf’ US domestic terrorists:
Washington Post
Behind the Lone Terrorist, a Pack MentalityBy Mike German
Sunday, June 5, 2005The FBI has long maintained that Timothy McVeigh, who was executed in 2001 for the Oklahoma City bombing that claimed 168 lives, was the prototypical “lone wolf” terrorist and that anyone implicated in the bombing conspiracy is behind bars. But old loose ends and troubling new revelations about McVeigh’s association with white supremacist groups have led many people to wonder whether a wider conspiracy was behind the bombing that took place just over 10 years ago. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, is considering holding hearings to try to answer these lingering questions. What he is likely to discover is not a disagreement over the facts, but a fundamental misperception of how most extremist groups operate.
Most people have never been to a Ku Klux Klan rally or a militia meeting; you don’t stumble into one by walking through the wrong door at the dentist’s office. Chances are, you wouldn’t know how to find where a white supremacist group meets in your community. In fact, you’d probably be shocked to learn that there was one in your community.
I learned how extremist groups operate firsthand as an FBI undercover agent assigned to fight domestic terrorism. They don’t always call themselves the KKK or the militia; they sometimes use benign names that mask their true nature. They might wear Nazi symbols right on their sleeves, but they might not. They could be just a couple of grumpy old geezers who meet for coffee at a local cafe, or a few young punks looking for trouble, or even one guy sitting in his basement chatting on neo-Nazi Web sites. But they are all part of an underground extremist community.
Even if you could find them, they wouldn’t just welcome you into a meeting. They tend to be suspicious of strangers. They use coded language and symbols that help them distinguish insiders from the uninitiated, and they are careful to avoid infiltrators.
But every once in a while, a follower of these movements bursts violently into our world, with deadly consequences — McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, Buford Furrow Jr., Paul Hill, to name just a few. And all these convicted murderers were identified as “lone extremists,” the most difficult terrorists to stop because they act independently from any organization.
Or do they?
Tim McVeigh seemed able to find a militia meeting wherever he went. He was linked to militia groups in Arizona and Michigan, white supremacist groups in Oklahoma and Missouri, and at gun shows he sold copies of “The Turner Diaries,” a racist novel written by the founder of a neo-Nazi organization. No one finds such groups by accident. Eric Rudolph, who planted bombs at the Atlanta Olympics, two abortion clinics and a gay nightclub, grew up in the Christian Identity movement, which identifies whites as God’s chosen people and encourages the faithful to follow the biblical example of Phineas by becoming instruments of God’s vengeance. Aryan Nations, formerly of Hayden Lake, Idaho, was a center of Christian Identity thought; not incidentally, Buford Furrow worked there as a security guard before going on a shooting rampage at a Jewish day-care center in Southern California. Paul Hill wrote of the need to take “Phineas actions” to prevent abortions and was so well known that the news media used him to speak in support of Michael Griffin’s killing of abortion doctor David Gunn. That Hill later shot an abortion provider himself should have surprised no one.
The fact that these individuals, after being exposed to extremist ideology, each committed violent acts might lead a reasonable person to suspect the existence of a wider conspiracy. Imagine a very smart leader of an extremist movement, one who understands the First Amendment and criminal conspiracy laws, telling his followers not to depend on specific instructions.
He might tell them to divorce themselves from the group before they commit a violent act; to act individually or in small groups so that others in the movement could avoid criminal liability. This methodology creates a win-win situation for the extremist leader — the violent goals of the group are met without the legal consequences.
Actually, there’s no need to imagine this. Extremist group leaders produce a tremendous amount of literature, including training manuals on “leaderless resistance” and lone wolf terrorism techniques. These manuals have been around for years and now they’re even available online.
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Beyond the grizzly reality that Louisiana police officers were just ambushed and gunned down by a bunch of political extremists, part of the reason that the string of attacks by the sovereign citizens (and now posse comitatus) is so topical is because both posse comitatus and the sovereign citizens are example of “leaderless resistance” and encourage the creation of both independent cells and the kinds of “independent” cells described in the above excerpt. It’s a type of “leaderless resistance” that’s become easier than ever before with the creation of the internet p(The Michigan Militia was already using the internet to communicate its message prior to the Oklahoma City bombing). And since folks can’t help but notice that there have quite a few right wing lone wolves in recent years, an obvious question for society is just how large the sympathetic community could be for these movements. As the previous article excerpt from “Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An exegesis” discussed, posse comitatus is a kind of extreme prototype for the much larger Patriot/militia movement that has ebbed and waned in the US over the past couple of decades and the sovereign citizens appear to be a sort of “posse comitatus 2.0”: a posse comitatus-like worldview stripped of much of the underlying racism with an exclusive focus on the strange legal theories. So when we see a group of sovereign citizens team up with a posse comitatus member to ambush the police it’s sort of like seeing the past and future of US far-right political extremism inhabit the same senseless act and same senseless political space. And parts of that same senseless political space is not only shared by a number of ‘Patriot’ and far-right groups with a history of violence but, increasingly the Republican Party:
Cursor.org
Rush, Newspeak
and Fascism:
An exegesisby David Neiwert
POSTED AUGUST 30, 2003 —
V. Proto-Fascism in America
by David Neiwert
...
The Patriot movement that inspired Tim McVeigh and his cohorts — as well as a string of other would-be right-wing terrorists who were involved in some 40-odd other cases in the five years following April 15, 1995 — indeed is descended almost directly from overtly fascist elements in American politics. Much of its political and “legal” philosophy is derived from the “Posse Comitatus” movement of the 1970s and ‘80s, which itself originated (in the 1960s) from the teachings of renowned anti-Semite William Potter Gale, and further propagated by Mike Beach, a former “Silver Shirt” follower of neo-Nazi ideologue William Dudley Pelley.21Though the Patriot movement is fairly multifaceted, most Americans have a view of it mostly through the media images related to a single facet — the often pathetic collection of bunglers and fantasists known as the militia movement. Moreover, they’ve been told that the militia movement is dead.
It is, more or less. (And the whys of that, as we will see, are crucial here.) But the Patriot movement — oh, it’s alive and reasonably well. Let’s put it this way: It isn’t going away anytime soon.
Note that this article excerpt was published in 2003, and the observation that the Patriot movement is “dead” has, itself, expired.
Continuing...
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The militia “movement” was only one strategy in the broad coalition of right-wing extremists who call themselves the “Patriot” movement. What this movement really represents is the attempt of old nationalist, white-supremacist and anti-Semitic ideologies to mainstream themselves by stripping away the arguments about race and ethnicity, and focusing almost single-mindedly on their underlying political and legal philosophies – which all come wrapped up, of course, in the neat little Manichean package of conspiracy theories. In the process, most of their spokesmen carefully eschew race talk or Jew-baiting, but refer instead to “welfare queens” and “international bankers” and the “New World Order”.
Forming militias was a strategy mainly aimed at recruiting from the mainstream, particularly among gun owners. It eventually fell prey to disrepute and entropy, for reasons we’ll explore in a bit. However, there are other Patriot strategies that have proved to have greater endurance, particularly “common law courts” and their various permutations, all of which revolve around the idea of “sovereign citizenship,” which makes every white Christian male American, essentially, a king unto himself. The movement is, as always, mutable. It includes a number of “constitutionalist” tax-protest movements, as well as certain “home schooling” factions and anti-abortion extremists.
As I explained it in the Afterword of In God’s Country:
...[T]he Patriots are not Nazis, nor even neo-Nazis. Rather, they are at least the seedbed, if not the realization, of a uniquely American kind of fascism. This is an overused term, its potency diluted by overuse and overstatement. However, there can be little mistaking the nature of the Patriot movement as essentially fascist in the purest sense of the word. The beliefs it embodies fit, with startling clarity, the definition of fascism as it has come to be understood by historians and sociologists: a political movement based in populist ultranationalism and focused on an a core mythic ideal of phoenix-like societal rebirth, attained through a return to “traditional values.”
As with previous forms of fascism, its affective power is based on irrational drives and mythical assumptions; its followers find in it an outlet for idealism and self-sacrifice; yet on close inspection, much of its support actually derives from an array of personal material and psychological motivations. It is not merely an accident, either, that the movement and its belief systems are directly descended from earlier manifestations of overt fascism in the Northwest — notably the Ku Klux Klan, Silver Shirts, the Posse Comitatus and the Aryan Nations. Like all these uniquely American fascist groups, the Patriots share a commingling of fundamentalist Christianity with their ethnic and political agenda, driven by a desire to shape America into a “Christian nation.“22
Griffin, in The Nature of Fascism, appears almost to be describing the Patriot movement two years before it arose, particularly in his description (pp. 36–37) of populist ultra-nationalism, which he says “repudiates both ‘traditional’ and ‘legal/rational’ forms of politics in favour of prevalently ‘charismatic’ ones in which the cohesion and dynamics of movements depends almost exclusively on the capacity of their leaders to inspire loyalty and action ... It tends to be associated with a concept of the nation as a ‘higher’ racial, historical, spiritual or organic reality which embraces all the members of its ethical community who belong to it.”
...The Patriot movement certainly is in a down cycle, and has been since the end of the 1990s. Its recruitment numbers are way down. Its visibility and level of activity are in stasis, if not decline. But right-wing extremism has always gone in cycles. It never goes away — it only becomes latent, and resurrects itself when the conditions are right.
And during these down periods, the remaining True Believers tend to become even more radicalized. There is already a spiral of violent behavior associated with Patriot beliefs, particularly among the younger and more paranoid adherents. As Griffin suggests, we can probably expect to see an increase in these “lone wolf” kind of attacks in coming years.
But there is a more significant aspect to the apparent decline of the Patriot movement: Its believers, its thousands of footsoldiers, and its agenda, never went away. These folks didn’t stop believing that Clinton was the anti-Christ or that he intended to enslave us all under the New World Order. They didn’t stop believing it was appropriate to pre-emptively murder “baby killers” or that Jews secretly conspire to control the world.
No, they’re still with us, but they’re not active much in militias anymore. They’ve been absorbed by the Republican Party.
They haven’t changed. But they are changing the party.
Once again, note that the above article was published in 2003. It’s been nine long years since the above observation that the GOP had already absorbed the ‘Patriot’/militia movements of the 90’s and what a nine years it’s been. Now, it’s important to reiterate that you average GOP member would probably find the sovereign citizens to be absolute lunatics and posse comitatus to repugnant at best. At the same time, it’s important to reiterate that posse comitatus, the sovereign citizens, the general ‘Patriot’ movement all share a common underlying John Birch Society-style conspiratorial worldview. And it’s a conspiratorial worldview increasingly shared with the Tea Party base. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a good conspiracy theory, but this is bad mojo:
IREHR
Tea time with the posse: Inside an Idaho Tea Party Patriots conference
Written by Devin Burghart
Monday, 18 April 2011 10:02A year ago, Pam Stout, a soft-spoken 67 year-old retiree from Bonners Ferry, Idaho was featured in the New York Times and asked to appear on the David Letterman show. She performed swimmingly, and portrayed the Tea Party as a wholesome movement of Middle Americans concerned about issues like TARP and health care reform.
An inside look at a recent Tea Party event organized by Stout shows a very different side of the Tea Parties, and highlights a disturbing direction taken by many local groups.
Little talk of repealing “Obamacare” or of modifying objectionable provisions of healthcare legislation took place at Stout’s “Patriots Unite” event, held March 26. The impending possibility of a government shutdown due to an impasse over the budget was hardly mentioned. Nary a word was spoken about bailouts or taxes. Instead, speakers at this Tea Party event gave the crowd a heavy dose of racist “birther” attacks on President Obama, discussions of the conspiracy behind the problem facing America (complete with anti-Semitic illustration), Christian nationalism, anti-environmentalism, and serious calls for legislation promoting states’ rights and “nullification.”
Stout, the Idaho state coordinator for Tea Party Patriots attracted around seventy Tea Party activists from Idaho, Montana, and Washington to the Coeur D’Alene Inn for the conference. The goal: to bring isolated Tea Party groups together. Originally scheduled as a two-day conference, Stout noted that the event was shortened because, “our workshop presenters are still in Wisconsin” presumably engaged in Tea Party anti-union organizing efforts.
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States’ Rights and Nullification
What Shea proposed is called the doctrine of nullification, part of the secessionist states-rights position which argues that individual states can unilaterally refuse to follow or enforce federal law they don’t agree with, or even abandon their relationship with the federal government completely if they’d like. These beliefs underlay the Confederates states’ rationale for seceding during the Civil War era, and also undergirded the defense of “legalized” Jim Crow segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, thanks to the Tea Party surge, this set of ideas has moved back into the mainstream.
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The John Birch Society and Anti-Semitism
After a short break, Leah Southwell, the national development officer for the John Birch Society (JBS) took the stage. She made sure to point out one of the Birch organizers in the house, Dale Pearce, from Nampa. Southwell also introduced her colleague Robert Brown, the Birch Society organizer for the region.
The John Birch Society has been part of the far-right since its founding in 1958. It has promoted a number of anti-communist conspiracy theories over the years, but its members occasionally veer off to advance more directly racist or anti-Semitic ideas. As a result of the Tea Party upsurge, the Birchers have found a more ready audience willing to buy what they are selling. That was the case in Idaho during this conference.
Brown’s did a PowerPoint presentation with a collection of slides entitled “The Power of 500.” It attempted to convey a diagnosis of “the root of the problem” facing America. But in actuality, his speech was like a far-right version of the on-line game Mad Libs – a fill-in-the-blank conspiracy with culprits left to the audience members imaginations.
Some in the crowd took it upon themselves to start shouting out answers. “The Trilateral Commission,” yelled one man. “The Council on Foreign Relations,” blurted another. “The Bilderburgers,” declared a third. Brown didn’t dissuade any of their suggestions; instead he just kept hinting that the real root of the problem was bigger and more ominous.
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Brown credited the John Birch Society strategy with “real change,” citing policies in Oklahoma such as a law prohibiting a NAFTA superhighway passing through the state, and a statute prohibiting use of Sharia law.
“The only thing that works is the John Birch Society approach,” Brown told the audience. While admitting the big Tea Party rallies of 2009 were a “big shot in the arm to the freedom movement,” Brown calculated that the money spent to get people to those rallies would be better spent hiring organizers (presumably Birch organizers) in every congressional district.
During the question session, a radio host from Sandpoint said, “The Birch Society used to be the whipping boys and laughing stocks of the movement. How do we get beyond getting blackballed?”
Brown said that “repeat exposure” to John Birch Society ideas was the key. It took him a while to get comfortable with the Birch Society, too, he confessed. He then went on to try to again link the Birchers and the Tea Parties, claiming that the way they attack the JBS is similar to the way they try to smear the Tea Party. “When you’re getting flack, you know you’re over target,” he exclaimed, to the delight of the audience.
Over lunch, many of the attendees expressed their pleasant surprise at the at Brown’s presentation and his approach. “I thought… “ahh, those Birchers...,’” noted one attendee, “but now I have a different opinion.”
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Robert Brown (the John Birch society representative quoted above) was quite right when he advocated repeat exposure as the best technique for the John Birch Society to move past getting blackballed by the larger conservative movement. Repeat exposure to their worldview has worked wonders for the Birchers with the larger conservative movement. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the chief architects for the Tea Party and the contemporary GOP have a long history with the John Birch Society:
Examiner.com
Tea Party Blood Ties: The reemergence of the John Birch Society in 20122012 Politcs
August 19, 2012
By: Gregory BoyceIn the mind of most liberal thinking Americans who stand staunchly on the side of America’s struggling 99%, there isn’t an ounce of doubt that tens of millions of fellow hard working and well-meaning Americans who religiously cast their ballot as “Republicans” are in reality being brainwashed, hoodwinked and manipulated by the new {but not improved} John Birch Society and their rambunctious “grandchildren”,… The Tea Party.
This insidious manipulation to dupe moderate Republicans into believing “America and freedom” is under siege by Socialism and Communism is being orchestrated by well-spoken, well-groomed and well-paid ultra-conservative politicians. Their “game” is to create in the mind of White voters a strong belief that America’s White European heritage is under attack and if gone unchallenged, White American culture will go the way of the dinosaur.
Historians and older Americans have heard this rant before, it’s not new, indeed, creating boogeymen while simultaneously selling fear and hatred is an ancient tactic that is often used by power-hungry humans.
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The John Birch Society is an American far-right political advocacy group that vehemently supports an anti-communist, limited government, and “personal freedom” political platform, even if accomplishing their objective comes at the expense of wrongfully smearing Americans who stand up for civil rights, labor unions, a diverse America and the limiting of big business’ influence in our government and in our lives. It was the John Birch Society that branded American General and President, Dwight D. Eisenhower “an agent of Communism.” Even JFK was accused by the John Birch Society as being a Communist sympathizer and an American traitor. Members simply believe that absolutely no one (that is targeted) is above their smear campaigns and their modern day “Salem Witch Hunts”.
The John Birch society warned in a recorded 1963 speech that still survives on tape in a University of Michigan archive, that “Americans must always be on high alert against a takeover of America in which Communists would infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until eventually the office of the presidency is occupied by a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”
In essence this exact same speech can be heard at Tea Rallies across America in 2012.
The ultra-conservative mantra of “The Communists are out to get you” was sung by the Birch Society in 1958 and fifty years later it’s still being sung by the Tea Partiers in the 21st century. The John Birch Society and the Tea Party, “two peas in a pod” or again, is it all just a coincidence?
“Behind the velvet curtains”, Koch family foundations have contributed tens of millions of dollars to Dick Armey’s “Freedom Works” which in turn serves as a major sponsor to the Tea Party. Tax records indicate that from 1998 to 2008, Koch-controlled foundations have donated more than $196 million to its conservative foundations and institutions.
With the coupling of free 24/7 media exposure from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News empire and the seemingly endless supply of money from David and Charles Koch, the Koch-Murdoch collaboration is an ultra-conservative force that has used talented “actors” to build / prime a political base that is inspired by a fear of an America that doesn’t resemble a Norman Rockwell painting.
When David Koch ran to the political right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket, he campaigned for the elimination of Social Security, welfare and federal regulatory agencies. He also campaigned on abolishing the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools. Sounds familiar?
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Oh...and by the way....
Koch Industries, based out of Wichita, Kansas, began with oil exploration and drilling in the 1930s and now manufactures a vast variety of industrial products. From Dixie cups to Lycra, — a synthetic fiber known for its exceptional elasticity — Koch Industries have made the Koch brothers billionaires and like their father, Fred C. Koch, they view the world in ultra conservative “hues.”
Fred Koch, a MIT graduate was a founding father of the John Birch Society and was among a select group of ultra conservatives that was chosen to serve on the John Birch Society’s top governing body.
Another coincidence? We don’t think so.
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The takeover of the GOP by the Tea Party is now a well established political reality in the US, as is the primary sponsorship of the Tea Party by the billionaire Koch brothers. But as the above article points out, a takeover of the GOP by the Tea Party is, in effect, a takeover of the GOP by the John Birch Society. Or at least by the general “there’s a commie hiding under you bed”-worldview held by the Birchers (note that the anti-communist views of the Kock brothers is somewhat ironic). Unfortunately, because the John Birch Society shares so much ideological overlap with movements like posse comitatus and the sovereign citizens, the recent surge in the popularity of far-right conspiracy theories also means there’s going to be an inevitable increase in general exposure to violent radical anti-government movements like posse comitatus. It’s just a mouse-click away these days.
Now, to be sure, we should not equate the Tea Party members with posse comitatus or the sovereign citizens. The vast majority Tea Party members may hold a really really really conservative political perspective. What makes the rise in the number of attacks by sovereign citizen cells so disturbing is that it’s a sign of the inevitable: The vast vast majority of individuals currently “drinking the Tea”, so to speak, are simply very conservative Glenn Beck fans. While they might dream of some pretty radical overhauls of society, they would still never share the kind of ultra-radical visions of society by the sovereign citizens, posse comitatus or any of the other radical fringe groups that share that Bircher worldview. And as Jared Loughner demonstrates, the appeal of the sovereign citizens is not limited to the right-wing, especially when mental illness is involved.
The threat of violent radicalism of the posse comitatus variety is nothing new. Timothy McVeigh and Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolf took the political grievances to the same violent “next level” of in the 90’s and both were steeped in the kind of “leaderless resistance” violence characterized by posse comitatus. And that “leaderless resistance” form of “political activism” is still very much in the fringe. But with estimates of up to 100,000 ‘hard core’ sovereign citizen adherents and as many as 200,000 “dabblers” in the ideology we unfortunately should expect a growing percentage of unhinged and/or desperate individuals to become immersed in the sometimes violent underworld of far-right quasi-anarchist/quasi-fascist extremism in coming years. Many ideas that would have considered the sole domain of conspiratorial militia groups are now acceptable “red meat” suitable for public consumption so a lot of memes pushing the next Jared Loughner are simply part of the din of the daily discourse. For instance, in addition to the general “President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Socialist” refrain, there’s the “Obama is secretly planning on implementing ‘Agenda 21’ in order to turn us into a globalist communist hell hole” meme. And that’s pretty much the John Birch Society/‘Patriot’ movement rebooted:
Think Progress
Republican Party Officially Embraces ‘Garbage’ Agenda 21 Conspiracy Theories As Its National PlatformBy Stephen Lacey on Aug 15, 2012 at 2:08 pm
If you want to understand just how extreme and conspiratorial many in the “mainstream” Republican party have become, look no further than a resolution on Agenda 21 passed quietly in January.
Agenda 21 is a completely non-binding international framework for sustainability passed in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit. The framework, which sets out very loose aspirational goals for making communities more efficient and less carbon-intensive, was signed by then President George H.W. Bush and later upheld by Presidents Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush.
Since the framework was adopted, right-wing conspiracy theorists have pushed bizarre theories about Agenda 21 being a central tool for the United Nations to create a one-world government and take away the rights of local property owners. In recent years, elevated by the megaphone of extreme pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, these conspiracies made their way into mainstream politics. Today, Agenda 21ers — many affiliated with the Tea Party and the John Birch Society — are peddling fears about Agenda 21 in order to stop basic efficiency and renewable energy programs on the state level.
Conspiracy theorists active in politics have called Agenda 21 “socialism on steroids” that would cause Americans to be “herded into centers like the UN wants.”
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So what do these historically-challenged and completely inaccurate claims have to do with the Republican party? The Republican National Committee has officially adopted these conspiracy theories as its national platform. In January, the RNC adopted a resolution calling Agenda 21 “insidious” and “covert.”
The United Nations Agenda 21 is being covertly pushed into local communities throughout the United States of America through the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) through local “sustainable development” policies such as Smart Growth, Wildlands Project, Resilient Cities, Regional Visioning Projects, and other “Green” or “Alternative” projects
The Republican National Committee recognizes the destructive and insidious nature of United Nations Agenda 21 and hereby exposes to the public and public policy makers the dangerous intent of the plan.
Interestingly, Agenda 21 activist Victoria Baer is a big supporter of Florida Tea Partier Ted Yoho, a man who unseat Republican Representative Cliff Stearns in a major upset during a primary race yesterday. Along with supporting the Agenda 21 conspiracy, Yoho also believes we should abolish the Department of Energy — the agency tasked with protecting our nuclear waste and nuclear weapons arsenal.
This is where the mainstream Republican party is headed.
So what are the origins of this bizarre shift in policy? And why have Agenda 21 activists gained such prominence within mainstream politics?
To explore the issue, I spoke with Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Potok has been tracking the rise of the Agenda 21 movement, which is rooted in the John Birch Society — a radical right-wing group that opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because they said it infringed on states’ rights. But Potok says that the issue is much broader than one single conspiracy and one single group.
Stephen Lacey: Many folks within the Agenda 21 movement have come from or are loosely aligned with the John Birch Society. So give us some background, what is the John Birch Society, how did it get formed, and what does it represent today?
Mark Potok: Well, it’s no surprise that it’s the John Birch Society that seems to be the primary pusher of the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory. I say that because they are most infamous, really, for two things. One is accusing President Eisenhower of being a “Communist agent,” which was a surprise certainly to Eisenhower. And the other, which is perhaps more like Agenda 21, is for their promotion of the idea that putting fluoride in drinking water is a plot to convert our children and all the rest of us to Communism. In other words, this is an organization that from the very beginning has touted completely ludicrous and baseless conspiracy theories. And, in fact, the John Birch Society was essentially driven out of the Conservative movement because it was such an embarrassment.
SL: But they’ve made a resurgence in recent years. What do they represent today? How are they becoming aligned with supposedly more mainstream Conservatives? And how have they regained a foothold in politics?
MP: It is hard to understand exactly how the John Birch Society has made itself more palatable to “mainstream” conservatives. The John Birch society began to reappear in a fairly significant way back in the 1990s when virtually every gun show in America, or every large gun show, had a booth with the organization. Back then, they were very heavily promoting the militia movement, as well as various conspiracies they believed the federal government was involved in. Then they sort of went quiet with the rest of the militia movement, which more or less petered out at the end of the 1990s. And in the last few years they have suddenly reappeared with quite remarkable success.
So the real answer to your question is that I do not quite understand how the John Birch Society has gotten so many city councils and county commissions and even state legislatures to listen to their nonsense. But they have. I suspect that it is related less to them having a huge amount of money or enormous numbers of people, and more to do with the idea that we’ve become so polarized politically as a nation that this kind of tripe really sells today. You know, what is most astounding of all is that the Republican National Committee has adopted oppositions to Agenda 21 as a core part of its platform and has asked that Mitt Romney include it as a part of his convention platform when the GOP convention gathers later this month.
SL: Well, let’s get into Agenda 21 more. For people who are paranoid about the UN promoting a One World Government, this is a gold mine for conspiracy theories. How has this group evolved and become more vocal?
MP: This is very similar to what we see going on with regard to arms control, gun control. The fact is, Barack Obama has done literally nothing on gun control except to allow further loosening of gun regulations to go forward — for instance, to allow people to open carry weapons in National Parks. And yet, there are groups out there that say that as soon as he is reelected — if in fact that happens — he will grab all Americans’ weapons and throw anyone who resists into concentration camps that have been secretly built by the government.
I think what’s happening with Agenda 21 is something very similar. There is an enormous, enormous amount of misinformation and plain foolishness being touted in the political mainstream as fact. We live in an era in which a Congresswoman [Michele Bachmann] is perfectly happy to accuse someone in the Department of State, with absolutely no basis whatsoever, of being an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood. My own Congressman, Spencer Baucus, from the middle of Alabama, has claimed that he personally knows that there are 17 Socialists secretly in the Congress. Alan West, another Congressman, said the other day he knew of 70 Communists in the government.
So, you know, this is the kind of garbage we are seeing every day now. And this has been going on for quite a little while. Let’s not forget that a candidate for President of the United States, Sarah Palin, just a few years ago, suggested that the President’s attempts to pass some kind of national healthcare plan, or extension of healthcare to more people in this country, was actually a plot to set up Death Panels to decide whether your and my grandmothers would live or die. So I just think that we live, sadly enough, at a time where conspiracy theories are pretty much destroying any kind of reasonable political dialogue in this country.
SL: You point to political partisanship as a main factor. But as you look throughout history at how conspiracy theorists and hate groups have grown, what other conditions need to be in place to make these theories so prevalent?
MP: I think that what is really going on is that the world is changing. And in our country, we’re seeing change in fairly dramatic ways. So, you see these kinds of crazy theories pop up at a time when major changes are a foot in our society — changes that really cause people to struggle, that make a significant number of people out there genuinely uncomfortable.
There are many things happening right now. Probably the most significant is that we, as a country, are losing our white majority. The census bureau has predicted that whites will fall under 50 percent of the population by the year 2050. Well, you know, that’s an enormous change. It’s already happened in California 12 years ago. And as a result, the politics of that state changed significantly. So it’s those kinds of changes, along with the very serious dislocations caused by economic globalization and by the kind of decline in the power of the nation state.
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If the Agenda 21 “UN communist takeover of the US” stuff adopted by GOP seems a little too arcane for most people to latch onto, what we just saw coming from a judge in Texas should adequately clarify that meme for public consumption:
TPM
Texas Judge Warns Of ‘Civil War, Maybe’ If Obama Wins
Nick R. Martin August 22, 2012, 3:26 PMUpdated: August 22, 2012, 4:08 PM
Texas Judge Tom Head is worried about what might happen if President Obama wins reelection in November. There could be riots, unrest or a “civil war, maybe,” he told a local television station this week.
Because of that, the Lubbock County judge has decided the only way to prepare is to increase taxes to help beef up local law enforcement.
“I’m thinking worst case scenario now,” Head said during an appearance on FOX 34 in Lubbock. “Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war, maybe. And we’re not talking just a few riots here and demonstrations, we’re talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy.”
The judge spun the elaborate conspiracy theory while calling for a 1.7 cent hike per $100 on property taxes in Lubbock County, a measure being considered by the commission there. He said he feared Obama would hand over sovereignty of the United States to the United Nations and the unrest would naturally follow.
Head’s role as judge is an elected position akin to executive of the county commission, which is known as a court. He presides over commission meetings, prepares the budget and is in charge of the county’s emergency management.
Under Head’s theory, the United Nations would then send in peacekeeping troops to try to quell the violence and that’s where he would draw the line. He vowed to stand in front of the county’s armored vehicle and stare down the U.N. troops if that happens.
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In keeping with “UN takeover meme”, we also find the chairman of the House Oversight Comittee pushing the classic “the government is plotting to take your guns away so it can forcibly implement a secret global communist agenda” meme:
LA Times
Targeting Eric Holder, Darrell Issa buys into gun nut delusionsBy David Horsey
June 22, 2012, 5:00 a.m.
The brouhaha over Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. and the contempt of Congress charge brought by U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R‑Vista) are providing new evidence that the lunatics are running the Republican asylum.
Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, would have us believe President Obama’s assertion of executive privilege in the dispute — “an eleventh-hour stunt,” he called it on Fox News — is part of a White House cover up of something much more sinister.
At issue are Justice Department documents related to a botched Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives operation run out of the bureau’s Phoenix office. As the ATF had done at least twice during the administration of George W. Bush, Operation Fast and Furious allowed illegal purchases of about 2,500 guns so that agents could follow the trail of the firearms to drug gangs in Mexico. In the event, the Phoenix team lost track of the guns, only to have a couple of them turn up after a firefight in which Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed.
When Congress began looking into the failed operation, the Phoenix office made things worse by providing false information to the DOJ that was then passed on to the investigating committee. Now, the committee wants every document related to the incident. Holder, backed by the president, is refusing to give Congress complete access.
In response, conservative bloggers have gone ballistic about Obama’s invocation of executive privilege, comparing it to Richard Nixon’s Watergate cover-up.
Just what is being covered up is not so apparent, at least to objective observers. But less-than-objective right-wing conspiracy theorists have a ready answer: Operation Fast and Furious was part of an elaborate plot to undermine the 2nd Amendment and take away citizens’ guns.
Michael Vanderboegh, a blogger with militia ties and a long history of talking up armed resistance to the government, asserts that the ATF purposely let the guns go to the bad guys in Mexico so that, after the ensuing bloodbath, the feds could justify a crackdown on assault weapons and gun shows.
Now, to rational human beings, that may sound totally ludicrous, but not to the folks at Fox News. They have made Vanderboegh a prime source for their coverage of this dispute, being elastic enough in their measure of qualifications to identify him as an “online journalist.” It’s not just Fox News, though. Vanderboegh’s curious theory has been picked up and repeated by Republican members of Congress, including Iowa’s previously sane Sen. Charles E. Grassley who, in a TV interview, echoed the idea that Obama and Holder could be using the Phoenix fiasco to build a case against gun rights.
This fits in with the broader conspiracy theory of Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Assn. The NRA boss has insisted that the reason Obama has done nothing to harm the 2nd Amendment in his first term is so he can win another four years in office, at which point his administration will start confiscating guns with no fear of retribution from voters. According to LaPierre, Obama is not taking your guns now so he can take them later.
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And then there’s the mainstreaming of ironically militant “pro-life” politics:
TPM
Sheriff Candidate OK With Deadly Force To Stop AbortionsNick R. Martin August 22, 2012, 7:07 PM
Frank Szabo wants the people of Hillsborough County, N.H., to know that if they elect him as sheriff this year, he will do whatever it takes to stop doctors from performing abortions — even if that means using deadly force.
In an interview on Wednesday with local television station WMUR, Szabo said he believed sheriffs were granted special powers under the Constitution. That means, he said, he would be empowered to arrest or even use deadly force against doctors for providing legal abortions for women.
“I would hope that it wouldn’t come to that, as with any situation where someone was in danger,” Szabo said. “But again, specifically talking about elective abortions and late term abortions, that is an act that needs to be stopped.”
He clarified it did not apply to cases in which the mother’s life was in danger. “That’s a medical decision. That’s out of the area I’m talking about,” he said.
It’s not clear what kind of chance Szabo has at winning the race. He claims endorsements from Jack Kimball, the former chairman of the state Republican Party, as well as multiple tea party groups. But WMUR reported that the state’s House speaker was already calling for Szabo to drop out of the race after his comments surfaced.
Szabo said he believed sheriffs are given enormous authority under his interpretation of the Constitution. When pressed about what he would do if a prosecutor declined to charge a doctor he arrested, he said the answer was simple.
“If they choose not to do their duty and uphold the Constitution,” Szabo said, “they can be brought up on charges before what’s called a citizen’s grand jury, which is something that’s not that common in the United States. But again, it is something based in common law that’s within the purview of the county sheriff.”
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On top of the militant “pro-life” stance did you catch the posse comitatus lingo? “Special constitutional powers” for county sheriff’s and “citizens’ grand juries”? That certainly sounds familiar. Now, given that Mr. Szabo apologized and retracted his statements, it might be easy to write off most of these fringe examples of extremism that don’t represent the political mainstream. But that would ignore the reality that contemporary mainstream politics appears to be focused on the definition of “legitimate rape” within the context of abortion restriction exemptions. It would also ignore the reality that Mr. Szabo appeared to be willing to temper his abortion opposition when the health of the mother was a risk, which is less extreme than Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s long-standing stance on the topic. In other words, once Szabo retracted his position on the use of lethal force against abortion providers, his stance on the topic appeared to actually be less extreme than the GOP’s Vice Presidential candidate. And that’s just on example of the crazy state of affairs in US politics.
Returning to the topic of the growing number of attacks on government and law enforcement by by a cell of sovereign citizens led a posse comitatus member, what are we to make of such a situation when the national meta-discourse has started to resemble a John Birch Society gathering? Well, for starters, it will do absolutely no good to simply refute all aspects of this Bircher-esque worldview. Asserting that government conspiracies can’t/don’t take place or that there isn’t a long history of egregious behavior by power international financial interests is both stupid and wrong. Bogus conspiracy theories can and should be addressed and refuted (usually fairly easily). Sadly, the best messengers for refuting this ‘Patriot’/militia worldview would be the leaders from within the conservative movement itself and that’s not very likely to happen anytime soon.
So, can anything be done about the ongoing and growth and mainstreaming of this sector of extremism? Well, one positive approach might be to celebrate the march of progress. After after, the US may be once again in the midst of some form of hysteria and neo-McCarthyism, but when the top neo-McCarthyites in congress are Alan West and Michelle Bachmann pushing these Bircher memes at least we can celebrate the far-right’s steps towards a post-racial/gender-neutral form of far-right nuttiness. There was never any reason why far-right fringe politics in the US would have to retain its racist tenor and it appears that the next generation of “sovereign citizens” really will encompass a more post-racial attitude. It may not be much, but it’s something:
The Daily Beast
The Patriot Movement’s New Bestseller Tests Their Anti-Racism
Jun 8, 2012 4:19 PM EDT
J.M. BergerYears after the racism of The Turner Diaries inspired Timothy McVeigh, the Patriot Movement has embraced a new bestselling series. J.M. Berger reads closely to see what they say about race and government in America.
An American Nazi Party volunteer recently produced a three-minute online video promoting the group’s platform. It spotlighted issues like the national debt, gas prices, domestic oil drilling, and America’s wars.
Almost as an aside, it mentions affirmative action. And despite some provocative imagery, the video never mentions the words Jew or black, or any related ethnic slurs. A white nationalist blogger praised the video for not “spamming people with inane Holocaust statistics or endless dry arguments over whether or not gas chambers existed.” Many militia groups now explicitly tell would-be members that they can’t also belong to a hate group.
Racism just doesn’t sell like it used to.
The paint is peeling on the mythical age of white hegemony that once provided a strong backbone for the Patriot movement, a diverse collection of loosely connected anti-government groups and ideologies that motivated Timothy McVeigh and many others.
Groups under the Patriot umbrella have often, but not always, embraced racial politics. The movement’s origins were heavily influenced by racist activists such as white nationalist William Pierce, author of the infamous 1978 novel The Turner Diaries, a dystopian novel about a racist revolution, which inspired a slew of imitators and successors.
Since the 1990s, some within the movement have tried to sideline or redefine its racial politics—whether out of sincere conviction or to avoid an inconvenient stigma—and focus on other issues such as gun rights, survivalism, individual liberties, traditional morality, and Constitutional hyper purity.
This process has gone far enough to suggest the outlines of what a post-racial Patriot movement might look like. Consider Enemies Foreign and Domestic, a Patriot-themed novel self-published by former Navy SEAL Matthew Bracken in 2003. Known to fans as EFAD, it’s the first in a trilogy of political thrillers. The plot goes like this: A rogue ATF agent stages a terrorist attack and blames it on an alleged racist militia (which turns out to be neither racist nor a militia). The attack is used as a pretext for repressive gun seizures by misguided liberals, while the ATF villain foments more trouble, killing innocent gun owners, and framing them as racist terrorists. In response, a series of individuals and small groups rise up to carry out acts of resistance and/or terrorism, culminating in a direct confrontation with the villain.
While spotlighting several Patriot memes, the first book in the trilogy has an almost militant multicultural drumbeat. EFAD’s heroes come from almost every imaginable ethnic background—white, black, Arab and Jewish. Between its serviceable writing and self-inoculation against charges of racism, EFAD is probably as close to a mainstream recruitment tool as the Patriot movement could hope for.
During February and March of this year, Bracken made the book available for free as an Amazon Kindle e‑book, and several Patriot blogs and Twitter feeds spent significant time promoting it, resulting in a brief stint as the No. 1 free Kindle book on Amazon. The idea was to break into the mainstream of conservative media (talk radio and the like). That effort fell short, but an online posting by organizers said more than 30,000 copies were downloaded.
EFAD represents a sharp break from its Patriot Lit forefathers, most infamously Pierce’s The Turner Diaries. That book has inspired at least dozens of admirers who tried to realize its concept of a revolution born from a campaign of terrorism, Timothy McVeigh among them. Told from the first-person perspective of a terrorist named Earl Turner, “Diaries” drips with racial animus from its opening pages, in which “negroes” armed with baseball bats forcibly disarm white Americans to enforce a repressive gun control bill. This inspires a general uprising targeting the government, Jews, and blacks and culminates in the use of nuclear weapons to ethnically cleanse New York, Washington, D.C., and Tel Aviv. White encampments are constructed in what remains of the United States; “race traitors” (such as those who intermarried with minorities) are summarily lynched.
In short, it is not a pleasant book, either for its values or its mind-numbing prose, reading more like a nasty after-action report than a story. Despite its limitations, The Turner Diaries spawned a legion of badly written dystopian future tales of race war, which are distributed online and in self-published tomes.
Unlike EFAD, The Turner Diaries and many of its imitators preach exclusively to the racist choir, aiming to inspire existing racists to action rather than trying to attract new blood for a broader anti-government movement. But EFAD’s depiction of a racially egalitarian, pro-gun, anti-government groundswell may be more evolution than revolution. The trilogy’s second and third books Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista released around 2006 and Foreign Enemies and Traitors in 2009—continue to separate racial hate and love for liberty, but they do so while drawing ever deeper from the well of white racial paranoia.
Book two describes the takeover of the American Southwest by illegal immigrants, specifically Hispanic racists out to reclaim their historic lands from the “gringos.”
This dramatic shift toward racial politics is offset by the fact that the book’s major protagonists are all brown people, from a Lebanese Arab heroine to a half-Cuban FBI agent to a crypto-Jewish-Hispanic-American former journalist. (The author’s olive branch to people of color does not, incidentally, extend to Muslims, gays, college professors, or people with piercings).
Book three, featuring a corrupt president who invites foreign mercenaries to run rampant on U.S. soil, sees Bracken’s continued stipulations against racism slowly but surely shouted down by the arrival of Earl Turner’s world. After an earthquake demolishes Memphis, black refugees turn into a seething mob of gang-rapists and cannibals—characterizations that feature memorably in The Turner Diaries—while urban blacks loot a path from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., where they demand and receive a new Socialist constitution engineered by a thinly veiled caricature of President Obama. The narrative disclaimers continue—one character condemns white racist killings in the chaos after the quake, and a battle-weary white racist girl near the end of the book accepts a hand of comfort offered by a black Army medic. But these and other moments of individual race grace are hard pressed to counterweight the vivid, lengthy depiction of African-Americans en masse as cannibal rapists directly responsible for destroying America’s Constitution.
EFAD perhaps illustrates both how far and how not-far the Patriot movement has come over the years. Inasmuch as the movement coheres, it has shifted from fairly open and aggressive racism to a more ambivalent, conflicted posture. It’s not uncommon for Patriot movement members to vehemently deny they are racists, even as they speak in hushed, reverential tones about Turner author William Pierce. Bracken doesn’t have that particular problem. In response to an email requesting an interview, he called The Turner Diaries a “racist screed” and insisted it brooks no comparison to his series, angrily declining to answer questions.
On the other hand, in a recent online posting, Bracken advised people who want to be safe from a possibly impending civil war to analyze where they live based on a spectrum of rich vs. poor, urban vs. rural—and lighter skin vs. darker skin.
Racism has been the Achilles’ heel of efforts to unify the Patriots for as long as the movement has existed, with different factions embracing wildly different views about whether to embrace it and to what degree. The Patriot subset that declines to accept racism continues to cope with the issue unevenly and defensively. As in mainstream politics, those who wish to participate or influence the direction of the movement face pressure to cater to the radical base.
The result is a muddled message in which racism may be vocally condemned, but race war is deemed inevitable. Traditional racist language is avoided as taboo, but racial stereotyping is seen as “facing facts.”
It is a rarified vision of a non-racist “realism” that can alienate white nationalist insiders while looking to outsiders like a distinction without a difference.
Awww, isn’t that precious: sure, a race war is inevitable, but racism is still bad. Now THAT’s progress! Anyone else feeling all warm and fuzzy?
“It emerged in the 1970’s and 80’s in rural America as a farming crisis displaced and dislocated rural communities.”
This is a key point. So many of these people were displaced by corporate farming and de-industrialization over the past 40 years.
They form a core of an incipient fascist storm front in a similar way as did ruined Junkers and disenfranchised middle-class Weimar Germans formed a core constituency for the Nazis.
This argument is also referred to as the Strawman argument.
The idea being when you are born, your birth certificate creates a legel fiction of yourself. This certificate is a contract that the legal system uses to apply it’s force. So in Third Perspective circles, the argument is used that the court has no legal jurisdiction over your flesh and blood self, only your Strawman paper legal fiction.
Many members of these groups use the system to avoid taxes, attending court when summoned with their birth certificate, and arguing that any fines and penalties are to be enforced on the paper legal fiction, not the real person.
In the UK, these same groups have even tried to use a mix of this and common law principle to arrest a Court Magistrate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDWVFrdYao8&feature=related
The silly thing is, this argument does not even work, and various members of this group have been arrested and charged. Then the idiots all say that the ‘establishment’ is scared and arresting people to shut them up, rather than the fact they have broken various laws and are essentially subverting law and democracy.
@ironcloudz: Here’s an interesting essay about that farming crisis: a global agricultural boom in the early 70’s leads to a US farming real-estate bubble, lulling/forcing the middle class farmers into speculation and over-leveraging. And somehow the government’s crisis response ends up giving significantly more subsidies than ever before while still managing to gut the middle class family farm, allowing the major players to pick up the pieces for pennies on the dollar. It’s a now familiar story.
@GW: I found it particularly amusing that actor Wesley Snipes was reported to have employed sovereign citizen-style legal argument in his tax evasion case because, really, if anyone out there is a sovereign citizen it’s Blade.
@GW: The straw man theory also adds a positive new twist to the Romney/Ryan plan to gut social security and medicare: “hey, we’re not trying to cut your entitlements, we’re planning on cutting your fictional legel straw man’s entitlements. You are still a free sovereign being. Free to die. Freedom!!!”.
Speaking of laughable legal arguments, and given the “straw man” legal theory you decribed, it raises the question of what the sovereign citizens’ stance is on the Birther stuff. Could they really insist that the President show a valid birth certificate when that very system of birth certificates is at the heart of a secret system for commoditizing and trading in our fellow citizens? And the answer is, well, in some instances yes...in a highly racist, sexist, and legalistically strange way.
I also have to say that I was surprised by Ron Paul’s refusal to endorse Romney or speak at the convention. And it’s not surprise at Ron Paul’s revolt or the reaction of his delegates. It was surprise that the RNC would basically preemptively mug it’s youth like that. After all, the Ron Paul delegation is probably a major component of the future of the GOP. Dissing the Paulites is like burning the bridge to the future.
But maybe it’s all an inartful part of Mittens’s long awaited “pivot to the center”, where the Romney disavows all the ‘red meat’ he’s been feeding the base during the primary season and Paul Ryan disavows Paul Ryan.
Or maybe it’s some sort of metaphorical political art, like ‘mugging the youth’-style medicare reform art acted out in the form of convention delegate rule changes. It’s all part of the unveiling of the Romney/Ryan 2012 slogan:
“You built that bridge to the future and we’re going to burn it down.
Also, give us your money.”
I think we have a winner.
The Left Behind Series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins presents a vivid and lasting multicultural motif throughout, embracing many races and nationalities. I wonder if this has had the effect of softening some of the racist edges of the Patriot movement as examined by J.M. Berger article cited above.
As long as you’re down with Christ, it’s all good.
@GrumpuRex:
That reminds me of a notorious excerpt from a fantasy Dominionist snuff piece written by William Lind, a co-founder the Free Congress Foundation (discussed at length here) alongside one of the father’s of modern conservative movement Paul Weyrich. Lind was also an early pusher of the “Cultural Marxist” meme (Anders Brievik was a fan of Lind and his meme). It’s a meme we see increasingly show up in mainstream politics these days but note that the theocratic snuff piece was written several years before 1995 and published in the Washington Post on April 30, 1995. This kind of radicalism has been mainstreaming itself for a while:
First off, William Lind, a co-founder of one of the key foundational conservative think-tanks of this era, was top aide of Democratic Senator Gary Hart? WTF? Also, as Atrios once pointed out, it was also somewhat unbelievable that Lind’s piece was published in the Washington Post at all, let alone less than two weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing. You may be expecting something resembling the Spanish Inquisition in Lind’s 2050 fantasy, but you probably didn’t expect it to be a Victorian Spanish Inquisition (sorry orphans). No one expects the Victorian Spanish Inquisition (via Lexis Nexis):
Sweet, no jackbooted federal thugs but if you’re “convicted of mugging on Tuesday you’ll be hung on Wednesday” by the locals. A confederation of cults bound by “culture”. Everything is as it should be.
Lind’s essay appears to be some sort of warning about a debased liberal modern culture and society and the harsh, necessary, and inevitable backlash against that modern abomination by the “real Americans” (that all appear to be Christian Dominionists). It’s also a reminder of how radical the far-right Christian nationalist utopian vision can get. The ultra-“small government” ideology of the Christian Dominionists/Libertarians/anarchists types doesn’t actually mean “small authority”. The meta-selling point for “small government” policies you see from politicians spewing out is that by “shrinking government” you’re “freeing the American people”. But what we see in Lind’s vision is something closer to what one should expect with the far-right’s envisioned “small government”: Big Church and Bigger Business. That part is strategically left out of the sales pitch and it’s a big deal because those far-right ultra-small government policies are now the GOP’s mainstream policies.
It’s all a reminder that “smaller government” = “redistribution of power” != “smaller authority”, especially when cryptofascist theocrats are calling the shots.
The old saying “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” doesn’t apply in all contexts
Florida’s GOP law makers in the House want to make it legal to carry concealed firearms without a permit during riots and natural disasters. More specifically, they want to allow you to legally carry your concealed gun and go to the riot if you happen to have missed all the fun. This will include emergencies declared by local officials. It’s part of Florida’s expansion of the ‘Stand your ground’ laws. So at least Florida residents won’t need to listen for the annoying high pitched emergency broadcast system to get alerted about an emergency. They can just wait for the flurry of gun shots:
The upcoming changes aren’t all crazy. For instance, firing a warning shot in Florida will no longer be more punishable than shooting someone.
This is fascinating: If you invite a bunch of militias to your ranch and hunker down for an armed stand off with the Federal government (see photos), and the Feds don’t go in guns a blazing, you can apparently claim you’ve ‘won’. But factor in that armed conflict is pretty obviously also what these groups are pining for (the PR would be amazing), so we’re seeing the “heads we win, tails we win with bloodshed” strategy at work. Because you can’t mainstream ‘crazy’ with reason. Whipped up passions and the threat of violence are what is needed for that kind of situation:
What’s next...
Look who’s endorsing the Bundy ranch in its claim that the Federal government has no right to regulate the use of public lands:
Is there still a chance that Joe the Plumber could resume his role as the GOP’s meta-man for this year’s elections? Someone should look into that because this “we’re all Clive the Rancher” meme is getting pretty scary.
Uh oh, Harry Reid is saying that the confrontation at the Bundy ranch ‘is not over’ and Bundy’s response is a call for country Sheriff’s across the country to “disarm the federal bureaucrats”:
Yikes. That call for “county sheriffs” to essentially declare war on the Federal government sure sounds like a Sovereign Citizen’s call to arms which means the threat of this ending is violence is by no means gone.
Ugh. Ok, it’s time to hide the women and children. For real. Hide the women and children.
Here’s a bit more on the ideological roots of the Bundy ranch showdown: Richard Mack, a former Arizona county sheriff and founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs, has been been promoting these kinds of issues for decades. And it’s Mack and the “Oathkeepers” that have been supplying the bulk of militia members that suddenly swooped in on the Bundy ranch:
Note that Cliven Bundy is being compared to Gandhi in the National Review. Somehow, Richard Mack, who was volunteering his wife and daughter to get gunned down as human shields in the above quote, hasn’t been receiving that same kind of praise.
Continuing...
Here’s another fun fact about Richard Mack. He co-wrote a book with Randy Weaver about Ruby Ridge. It’s one of many fun facts about Richard Mack and the Oathkeepers in this long SPLC piece from the fall of 2009 about the resurgence of militia movement that began immediately after Barack Obama came to office. 2009 is the same year the Oathkeepers got started. It’s a reminder that the 2009 “summer of crazy” never ended. It just kept getting hotter and hotter:
If all this seems like an alarming situation, just be thankful the cattle isn’t inclined to go sightseeing.
With the Bundy Ranch standoff looking like it’s merely gone into remission, the US is likely to be asking itself the question “what would it be like if the federal government lost the ability to regulate the use of federal land and it was suddenly returned to states and/or local officials?” for the foreseeable future. It’s one of the many oligarch-friendly questions conveniently raised by the Bundy ranch’s war on the federal government:
Ah, so we have state officials arguing that the federal government simply isn’t capable of proper land management due to factors like an extreme financial crisis at the national level (what could have caused that?). And the proposed solution the is for the western states with massive portions of federal land to suddenly assume that responsibility under the premise that they’ll do a better job. It’s certainly possible that the states could do a better job than the feds. Note, for example, the environmentalists that point out how the BLM wasn’t even complying with “the most basic requirements for management of desert tortoises and other rare and vulnerable wildlife”, so there’s clearly quite a bit of room for improvement.
But how will the states pay for this new found responsibility? That’s not clear. At all. Although it sounds like it will involve selling more mineral rights:
Surprise! While illegal ranching has become the face of this latest “states rights” fight, it’s mineral rights (i.e. oligarchs’ rights to those minerals) that’s on lawmakers’ s minds. And with a lot to minerals to sell, those rights could probably come pretty cheaply. Hence the interest:
Isn’t it neat how a ranching conflict in Nevada is leading to a ‘grass-roots’ political movement that’s potentially going to free up vast mineral reserves in Utah, Colorado, and Wymoming. Funny how that worked out.
But also sounds like Utah’s state regulators will have to have to polish off their conflict resolution skills once they gain oversight over all those mineral-rich federal lands because the the environmentalists and the mining industry can’t seem agree on the risks of tar sands and oils shale mining. Hmmmm....which interest group will state officials side with? The environmentalists or the Koch brothers and ALEC?
It’s this broader topic of “states rights to sell mineral rights” highlight the fact that the question “should the states take over federal land regulations?” begs a parallel question “since the states that are trying to change these laws obviously want to dramatically increase the mining taking place there, what will happen when the Koch brothers and their affiliates suddenly become my next door neighbors?”
Should we expect there be more “oopsies”, like the recent dumping of nausea-inducing chemicals into the West Virginian water supply on all those newly liberated lands? The facility that leaked the chemical, which was located right next to the local water supply source, was the distributor of Koch-owned Georgia Pacific’s Talon™ Mining Reagents for distributing used chemicals to break down coal ash. The facilities were also decrepit. And nobody’s quite sure of who owns what.
Does that sound appetizing? Because a lot more fun times like West Virginia’s “Freedom Industries” experience might be coming to the Western US?
Stories like this are also a reminder that extreme anti-government movements rooted in the sovereign citizens/Posse Comitatus philosophy aren’t just anti-government. They’re potentially very pro-oligarch.
Cliven Bundy on ‘the Negro’, in his own words:
Get ready for more bold standoffs for freedom. Courage is contagious.
It looks like we have a clarification from Cliven Bundy regarding his recent comments on ‘the Negro’:
Ah, there we go. He meant every word of it but they were merely words of wonder. Good thing that’s all cleared up.
We now return to your regularly scheduled programming...
Given how disappointed Cliven Bundy was over the lack of minority supporters at the the Bundy ranch (for mysterious reasons), this has got to hurt:
The times they are a‑changin’! And yet, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Rejoice Koch heads and fans of subsistence grave robbing, the cavalry has arrived:
Yes, the ATV cavalry is coming to the ancient burial grounds of Utah, but if Gun Owners of America director Larry Pratt (and Bundy booster) gets his way, they may not be there for long. There are other battles to wage. Everywhere:
Yes, why send only one sheriff to the San Joaquin water facility when, obviously, there might be a violent standoff? 25 armed sheriffs will clearly be needed.
Of course, if the federal government has already released the water before the posse arrives they might have to pick another fight (there’s a growing wishlist so that shouldn’t be an issue).
Or the ATV posse can just hang out in San Joaquin and wait for the water crisis to grow even worse leading to even more opportunities to send in the sheriffs. It shouldn’t take too long:
Uh oh! Now that the ground is sinking, even California’s farmers are talking about regulating their use of a shared resource. And it sounds like it’ll be a blend of local management with state oversight, so the war on the Feds won’t really apply. How are ‘Bundy’s Buddies’ going to respond to that? Declare victory and ride on to greener pastures? Or will the battle simply morph one of those ‘Kochs vs the locals’ fight? It’s hard to say. Civic autoimmunity disorders can take many forms.
Will the ATV Freedom Brigade make it to the big “overthrow the government” rally in DC? The roads should still be clear so we’ll just have to wait and see if the government surrenders some time soon...
What? Sarah Palin wasn’t listed as one of the “principle leaders”? What happened? Regardless, it would be interesting to see how many of the ‘principled leaders’ listed above would be on board with the tribunal idea. It could be pretty demoralizing to their base if they weren’t. And that’s part of what makes stunts like this so fascinating: given the wacky, over-the-top nature of the scheme it’s unclear what the real impact might be on the far right base that attends these kind of events. Are the organizers really going to fuel the ol’ ‘impeach the imposter!’ movement that started back in March of 2009 (and presumably earlier)? Or are they just going to end up demoralizing it:
Aha! Well now we know the cause Operation American Spring’s downfall: The ongoing Bundy Revolution is stealing all the manpower! Now it all makes sense, although this couldn’t have been very surprising since there’s a planned “sister event” at the Bundy Ranch (which must be VERY crowded). So it appears the Bundy revolution is going to have to run its course before the American Spring can truly flower in DC. If only there was a drone army that recognized the moral imperative of whatever the far right tribe happens to be feeling at the moment.
When the local stream starts running dry there’s only one thing to do to protect what’s left: try to access the remaining trickle of water by framing the whole issue into a States’ rights fight:
So will cooler heads prevail or will the ATV Brigade of Freedom be necessary to free the Agua Chiqita stream from the tyranny of regulations? Only time will tell. And hopefully time will heal some wounds too, but don’t assume the time will heal all wounds. The festering ones might spend that time festering:
Uh oh, the ATV Brigade of Freedom may not be enough to free the US from the tyranny of drought. We’re going to need a bigger miracle (hopefully not too big).
A heavily armed man described as a “sovereign citizen” assaulted a Georgia courthouse today:
Two white supremacists that claimed to have been kicked off the Bundy ranch just killed two Las Vegas police officers during a “revolutionary” suicidal killing spree:
Here’s a confirmation that one of the Las Vegas shooters, Jerad Miller, was at the Bundy ranch. He was interviewed on tv while he was there and expressed how he had no desire to bring violence towards federal agents but was willing to do so.
Here’s something relating the shootings in Las Vegas to the larger anti-government paranoia gripping the nation and the drive to normalize vigilante justice: The two shooters were originally from Indiana and, in a sign of the times, it turns out Indiana passed a law in 2012 that makes it legal to shoot cops and “public servants” if you think they’re illegally entering your home or using force unlawfully:
There was another shootout today involving law enforcement officers and a ‘sovereign citizen’:
In tangentially related news, there’s a new threat Cliven Bundy’s right to graze on public lands whether or not he pays the fees. And it involves an even more diabolical government conspiracy than the far right already fears: climate change:
And in tangentially related (to tangentially related) news, the planned closure of the HAARP facility in Alaska just got delayed for a few weeks... or maybe longer:
“Air Force leadership is currently considering the option of deferring the dismantling for up to 10 months to allow time for a potential transfer to another entity” *gulp* It looks like the ATV Freedom Brigade might need an upgrade.
It’s always been clear governor Paul LePage enjoys embracing the crazy, but this is taking it to a whole new level: Main’s governor appears to be a rather cozy relationship with Sovereign Citizen groups, to the point of spouting off about how the sheriff is the highest authority in the land. The governor is saying this. If the entire GOP wasn’t already flirting with Sovereign Citizen ideology at this point this story would be a much bigger deal as breaking news. Still, it’s a great metaphor for what’s happened to the GOP:
What a great metaphor.
“You see an illegal. You point your gun dead at him, right between his eyes, and you say, ‘Get back across the border or you will be shot,’”. This statement by one of the militia leaders planning on ‘supplementing’ the US border patrol was apparently taken out of context:
Beyond all of the questions of the “OMG, how are we going to avoid another Bundy Ranch standoff?”-variety, one of the questions raised by the latest move is who is going to protect the Bundy Ranch now that his impromptu militia is going to be battling women and children in Texas? Aren’t the Feds going to seize on this opportunity to strike at the last truly free rancher left in Nevada?
Oh that’s right, it’s not the Feds threatening Bundy now. It’s the county sheriff, the one authority even Sovereign Citizens recognize. And it’s not just Bundy being threaten by the Sheriff but the militias involved too. Uh oh!
What’s wrong with this picture? Too easy?
So Bob doesn’t think Fox is going to get excited about “Operation Normandy”. Awww. There’s goes another teachable moment, although it’s probably for the best.
Here’s a reminder that armed militias on the lookout for refugee women and children are still patrolling the Texas border:
In other news...
@Pterrafractyl
Also speaking of the border, the organization Judicial Watch has put out the following alert regarding Isis in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico along side the Texas City of El Paso. I can’t tell you how much I hope this report is wrong, but would also worry about militia elements in cahoots with Isis, similar to what Spitfielist.com has presented potentially on Oklahoma City, on a September 11th, sick commemoration. Let’s hope this thought is hog wash. Anyway sincere thanks for your voluminous efforts to awaken and alert.
“Ft. Bliss Increases Security
AUGUST 29, 2014
UPDATED: 08/31/2014 at 4:45 PM ET Islamic terrorist groups are operating in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez and planning to attack the United States with car bombs or other vehicle born improvised explosive devices (VBIED). High-level federal law enforcement, intelligence and other sources have confirmed to Judicial Watch that a warning bulletin for an imminent terrorist attack on the border has been issued. Agents across a number of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense agencies have all been placed on alert and instructed to aggressively work all possible leads and sources concerning this imminent terrorist threat. Specifically, the government sources reveal that the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) is confirmed to now be operating in Juarez, a famously crime-infested narcotics hotbed situated across from El Paso, Texas. Violent crimes are so rampant in Juarez that the U.S. State Department has issued a number of travel warnings for anyone planning to go there. The last one was issued just a few days ago. Intelligence officials have picked up radio talk and chatter indicating that the terrorist groups are going to “carry out an attack on the border,” according to one JW source. “It’s coming very soon,” according to another high-level source, who clearly identified the groups planning the plots as “ISIS and Al Qaeda.” An attack is so imminent that the commanding general at Ft. Bliss, the U.S. Army post in El Paso, is being briefed, JW’s sources say. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to multiple inquiries from Judicial Watch, both telephonic and in writing, about this information. But two days after JW published this report Ft. Bliss implemented increased security measures. The statement that went out to the media attributes the move to several recent security assessments and the constant concern for the safety of military members, families, employees and civilians. However, El Paso’s newspaper credited JW’s Friday piece about ISIS terrorists planning an attack on U.S. soil from Juarez as a possible factor. The disturbing inside intelligence comes on the heels of news reports revealing that U.S. intelligence has picked up increased chatter among Islamist terror networks approaching the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. While these terrorists reportedly plan their attack just outside the U.S., President Obama admits that “we don’t have a strategy yet” to combat ISIS. “I don’t want to put the cart before the horse,” the commander-in-chief said this week during a White House press briefing. “I think what I’ve seen in some of the news reports suggest that folks are getting a little further ahead of what we’re at than what we currently are.” The administration has also covered up, or at the very least downplayed, a serious epidemic of crime along the Mexican border even as heavily armed drug cartels have taken over portions of the region. Judicial Watch has reported that the U.S. Border Patrol actually ordered officers to avoid the most crime-infested stretches because they’re “too dangerous” and patrolling them could result in an “international incident” of cross border shooting. In the meantime, who could forget the famous words of Obama’s first Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano; the southern border is “as secure as it has ever been.”
These new revelations are bound to impact the current debate about the border crisis and immigration policy”
http://www.judicialwatch.org/bulletins/imminent-terrorist-attack-warning-feds-us-border/
@GK: DHS refuted Judicial Watch’s reports of ISIS members in Juarez so let’s hope that’s the case.
In related news, here’s a recent story that highlights both the fact that the latest bout of border-patrol vigilante fever isn’t just festering in Texas:
As Mark Kessler described above, his militia was “expecting to be attacked by heavily armed cartels” and “armed for an all out battle with drug smugglers” and he seemed quite surprised not to have run into any so far. In addition to being just generally alarming, statements like that also raise questions about the finances the militias and how long they can operate for before they’re forced into financial retreat. Because if the funds start running low and the militias haven’t yet quenched their thirst for patrolling the desert, groups seeking to do battle with heavily armed cartels (that might be carrying some very valuable cargo) might also become a little trigger-happy, making an already bad situation much worse.
Here’s a reminder that the Sovereign Citizens phenomenon isn’t limited to the US:
Back in August people were asking if far right GOP Senate candidate Joni Ernst’s “flirtation” with the fringe would hurt her in the general election. It was a reasonable topic of speculation all things considered:
Note that in addition to pushing for nullification of Obamacare, Ernst has also backed the arrest of federal officials trying to implement it.
Continuing...
That was back in August. With Joni Ernst now leading in the polls, the question is somewhat different now:
So is the GOP’s pervasive extremism a character issue in contemporary US politics? Well, based on Iowa’s Ernst-experience it looks like the answer is “not if you do it right...”
What do you get when you introduce hemorrhagic fever into the far right fever swamps? The kind of shrill hysterics that might induce a stroke and make your ears bleed:
Well, as far as far right freak outs go, at least it was just directed at Obama, something we’ve all been thoroughly vaccinated against by now. It could have been worse!
It was just a matter of time:
Don’t believe Brittany? You will once you learn that the government is hiding that fact that AT LEAST 10 ISIS MEMBER HAVE BEEN CAUGHT CROSSES THE US MEXICAN BORDER!!! So says far right congressman Duncan Hunter:
Note that Hunter isn’t backing off the claim and is now asserting that a “high-level source” at DHS told him. It would be interesting to learn if Hunter’s alleged source for this bombshell is a current DHS official or a former one.
Here’s the latest indication that Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch really should be considered the unofficial id of the contemporary GOP: It looks like Judicial Watch’s previous “ISIS on the border!” claims may have been the source of Congressman Duncan Hunter’s claims that ISIS fighters have already been arrested trying to cross the US/Mexican border, although it’s still unclear. While Hunter’s office is now referencing a new Judicial Watch blog post as evidence of the arrest of ISIS members, Hunter also appears to be sticking to the original story about a “high-level source”:
Well that clears everything up, doesn’t it! Also note that if you read the Judicial Watch blog post Hunter’s office referred as evidence of these arrests, the post was written after Hunter’s claims and also cites unnamed “Homeland Security sources”:
So Duncan Hunter cited unnamed “high-level officials” in making his claim that at least 10 ISIS members have been detained on the US/Mexican border, and when pressed for more information Hunter’s office then refers to a blog posting by Judicial Watch written after Hunter made his televised claims that also refers to unnamed sources claiming that 4 ISIS member have been arrested in just the last 36 hours. Welcome to the echo chamber. Abandon hope all ye who enter.
It’s natural for teenagers to be embarrassed by their parents. In this case it’s unclear who is embarrassing whom:
Well that had to lead to some awkward father/son conversations.
In related news, Iowa Congressman Steve King was recently videoed at an event with Donald Trump where he had a public conversation about how President Obama was turning the country into a third world nation with Ebola and ISIS flooding through the borders. As far as Ebola fear-mongering goes, it was par for the course. It was also par for the course for Steve King and not at all surprising given the intense fever that has fully infected the GOP in the final stretch of the US midterms.
What is a little surprising, at this point, is that Iowa appears to be ready to elect Senator that almost makes Steve King look sane in comparison. Almost. As the article points out below, the GOP’s candidate for the US Senate, Joni Ernst, is no Sarah Palin, because, for instance, Sarah Palin isn’t actually an elected official anymore but has opted for the Fox News gravy train whereas Joni Ernst is poised to become Iowa’s next senator. See the difference?
Well there we go! Comparing Joni Ernst to Sarah Palin isn’t really fair. While Ernst certainly sounds like Sarah Palin when she’s pushing things like Agenda 21, nullification, and banning forms of contraception, Ernst also backed away from comments advocating impeaching President Obama. That’s not very Palinesque. And once she broke with her party this year to support radon testing in schools (with friends like these...). And then later this year Ernst “took on her own party” (along with nearly half of her fellow GOP state senators) and voted in favor of allowing kids to use medical cannabis oil (which Bruce Braley also supports. And sort of Sarah Palin. And Rand and Ron Paul. It’s not exactly a bold stance at this point). Ernst is totally not like Sarah Palin at all! And that’s probably good news for Joni Ernst since it turns out Sarah Palin is political poison in Iowa:
Will the GOP drive over the crazy cliff and lose in Iowa or win in Iowa, take the Senate, and drive the whole country over the cliff? We’ll find out. But if she does win, it should be really interesting to see what her stance will be on federal agricultural subsidies given the Koch’s ample gift-giving to the Ernst campaign and the Koch’s brothers’ stated goal of ending agricultural subsidies completely.
Ernst’s stance on government subsidies is that she’s ‘philosophically’ opposed to them but is willing to support Iowa’s federal subsidies unless we get rid of all the other subsidies at the same time. Yep, that’s her position.
The Koch brothers are beneficiaries of agricultural subsidies but they also seem pretty sincere in their attempts to end all subsidies and why not? What’s going to be easier to claw back after all the subsidies have been nuked: subsidies for billionaires or subsidies for the rest of us?
Overall, it’s kind of hard to say if we should expect cuts to LittleAg only or BigAg too. The Kochs seem desparate to gut all the programs for the the poor but they also really like money and corporate subsidies benefit them too. And yet the Kochs are clearly willing to spend vast sums of their personal fortunes on getting people with a mission to gut programs for the poor elected to office. So who knows whether or not the Kochs will actually try to create the political dynamic where Ernst and the rest of the Kochtopus get a chance to truly end all agricultural subsidies along with all other subsidies simultaneously (it seems like corporate America would find ways to keep their slice) but it’s pretty clear that Ernst would vote to just nuke all subsidies, good and ill, if the opportunity arises. And if you listen to her recently unearth comments about how Americans need to be taught “painful lessons” in living without government services it’s pretty clear that Ernst is anxious to cut some non-agriculture subsidies benefiting everyone, no matter what.
That’s one of the reasons the Kochs and their sponsored candidates like Joni Ernst are like a box of chocolates. Sugar-free chocolates: You never know what you’ll get inside but you’d really prefer the non-sugar-free version unless you happen to have diabetes. Although for Iowans that do have diabetes and can’t afford their medical costs the Koch & Ernst brand of ‘sugar-free chocolates’ should be avoided at all costs:
Yes, “painful” lessons are coming to the US Senate and Ernst is bringing it. To all of us. Somewhat indiscriminately. The cannabis oil should help.
Iowa GOP Senate candidate and aspiring Koch Ring-wraith Joni Ernst surprised Iowa’s journalists by suddenly canceling meetings with the editorial boards of a number of local newspapers, prompting some journalists to wonder what’s Joni suddenly afraid of?
Wow. With less than two weeks to go maintains Joni Ernst’s anti-journalist cone of silence remains with the race statistically tied. And then she cancels all of her interviews with local editors at the last minutes and instead we get another round of pig castration ads with Joni telling us:
It’s kind of a hilariously dark coincidence that the castration ads have been part of what fueled Ernst’s popularity since they’re intended to show her commitment to making the most painful cuts you can imagine to public services which is an alarmingly accurate description of what she would do given the chance and something you would think she wouldn’t be bragging about. So those castration ad blitzes do sort of act as a concise summary of her platform. Who needs to talk to the local media? She’s wants to castrate government services. What else is there to say?
Ok, maybe she could talk about the other hot topic that just hit the Ernst campaign: her 2012 talk at an NRA even where she casually dropped a line about her preparedness to use her guns for armed revolution:
It looks like someone needs to reign in their inner-Sovereign Citizen (there can be only one). We already had to worry about Joni advocating nullification and the arrest of federal employees. Now we’re finding out she’s been talking about her readiness for a shootout with “the government” at NRA events. It’s starting to feel like Cliven never left.
Fox News’s Chris Wallace just predicted that the GOP would try to impeach Obama if executive action is taken on immigration. If you’re wondering where Wallace’s predicted confidence is coming from, here’s an example:
Keep in mind that Congressman King was far from the only GOPer pushing impeachment over immigration action at the time, but that was also several months ago and not the eve of an election. So uttering the ‘i’ word was a relatively low-risk move for Congressman King.
How about closer to the election? Well, Steve King certainly hasn’t been shy about reiterating his calls for impeachment, but he laid out a new plan a couple of weeks ago that might be considered an alternative to impeach: call for protests that surround the White House “until he let’s go of this unconsitutional action”. In other words, instead of immediately jumping to impeaching, Steve King wants to see the GOP lead some sort of ‘Occupy the White House’ movement first:
Occupy the White House here we come! It should be interesting to see how wild those protests get. Assuming the protestors aren’t waving Confederate flags and calling for the president to “leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up” these protests should be far more telegenic than any drawn out impeachment process.
Of course, since there’s a strong likelihood this protest strategy won’t achieve the desired results, it’s very possible that this White House protest plan was purely Steve King’s wishful thinking. So maybe the GOP will just stick with the ‘i’ word.
Then again, since the actually viability and the likelihood of successful for their Obama-opposition schemes isn’t really an issue for the GOP, maybe a high profile protest strategy really is the best option for the GOP, at least as some sort of impeachment appetizer. Just imagine all of those scenes of massive crowds outside the White House and what it could do to rally the public around the movement. Just imagine...
And the GOP’s civil war has begun. No, not the civil war between the sane and insane wing of the party. You can’t fight the dead. No, less than weeks after the midterms, what the GOP now faces isn’t even the ‘impeachment vs shutdown’ civil war. It’s the ‘impeachment and shutdown vs shutdown only vs add to Boehner’s lame lawsuit vs don’t do anything’ civil war. It’s one of the GOP’s strange periodic civil wars where all sides pretty much share the same goal, but they’re not quite sure how to get there. And because this is the GOP we’re talking about, it just might dissolve into an intra-party civil war. A war over how much craziness the party needs to exude in order to adequately express its outrage over the government not being as mean as possible to disempowered immigrants. Because that’s how the GOP rolls:
As we can see, Trey Gowdy, a member of the “shutdown” clan, uses the “appropriations process” verbal sign to indicate his intra-GOP gang allegiance. It’s a powerful gang with powerful members:
And keep in mind that the “government shutdown” gang doesn’t just include the Heritage Foundation. The Speaker of the House is also flashing “shutdown” gang signs, although it’s not the only sign he’s flashing:
Yes, as John Boehner put it, “all options are on the table”:
So the message from the GOP’s top official in the House is that:
1. All options are on the table.
2. House Republicans can find other ways, even beyond the government funding measure (shutdown threats).
3. No decisions a have been made, and discussions are ongoing.
Was John Boehner just cryptically flash an “impeachment” gang sign in the middle of his rant about all options being on the table? Keep in mind that Rep. Matt Salmon — the author of the declaration above “urging the head of the Appropriations Committee to include language in funding bills to block Obama’s executive action on immigration,” that received 59 signatures — and Rep. Steve King are both also throwing out “impeachment” gang signs too. So it might be tempting to think that Boehner is attempting to make it look like he’s a member of the “impeach and shutdown” gang too. But there’s another option. A much, much lamer option:
Yes, while John Boehner might sort of sound like he’s on team “impeach and shutdown”, he’s also flashing the gang sign for “lame lawsuit that law firms keep quitting” which is the lamest possible gang sign he can flash at this point. It’s almost insulting to the base. And with Mitch McConnell hinting at no shutdown or impeachment, and John Bohner hinting that he’s planning on merely pretending he’s interested “all options on the table” but is really just interested in expanding his sad lawsuit, it’s looking like we can expect the GOP to enter the 2016 primary season with a base that is both whipped into an impeachment/shutdown frenzy and left deeply wanting. Don’t forget: the the first debate is set for September 2015. And that means the whole GOP 2016 Primary crazy train is going to leave the station during time that when the GOP base wants to derail government more than ever without any sort of viable venting from the GOP leadership.
When John Boehner says ‘all options are on the table’ but ends up really only offering the lamest option possible while toying with the base’s anti-immigrant hopes and dreams right before the 2016 primary, we should probably expect that all options are indeed going to be on the table. But not the “showdown with the President” table. The 2016 GOP nomination table. The base will not be ignored.
Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn is warning that if President Obama issues an executive order on immigration people will suddenly think “Well, if the law doesn’t apply to the president ... then why should it apply to me?” And then violence and anarchy will ensue:
Yes, when presidents issue the executive orders the rule of law collapses. It’s just what happens.
So, as Josh Marshall asks below, just what will that violence and anarchy look like this time around since it’s not really clear who the aggrieved party is in this situation. Might we be in store for a return of Bundy Ranch-style standoffs with the federal government by GOP-friendly far right anti-immigrant militia groups that attempt to impose their own anti-immigrant policies? Maybe?
During trying times like these, when threats of violence and anarchy are on the horizon, sometimes the only source of relief is just holding your loved ones closer and hoping everything works out. Although keep in mind that the ‘hug a loved one’ form of stress relief shouldn’t be used in some situations.
Well, now that President Obama went ahead and, uh, ‘undermined the rule of law’ with his executive actions over immigration, one of the next obvious question is when Latinos are going to engage in mass ethnic cleansing. Ok, that may not be an obvious question for everyone. But for individuals that, for instance, crafted Arizona’s notorious “papers, please” law targeting Latinos(and advised Mitt Romney), the question of when the Latino-led ethnic cleansing starts is an obvious question:
In related ‘rule of law’ news...
Following the ambush-style assassination/suicide of two New York City police officer by a deranged man out to get revenge for the death of Eric Garner (after shooting his girlfriend), a profile of the shooter, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, is starting to trickle in although it’s still going to be a while before we get a better sense of the influences that may have motivated the shooter beyond a base desire for revenge.
So, it’s worth recalling that, unlike Jerad and Amanda Miller, the motives that drove the last ambush-style shootings of two police officers is still somewhat unclear:
Note that Frein is probably a far right lunatic, but it’s still unclear what particular strain of far right lunacy he follows. It’s all a reminder that the influences that shaped Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s life and led him to become a cop-killing wannabe martyr are by no means unique. Tragically.
Oh great. The spirit of Cliven Bundy is haunting a gold mine in Oregon:
Ok, to summarize:
1. There’s dispute between the BLM and the owners of the Sugar Pine Mine gold miners in Southwestern Oregon over whether or not their rights include only mining rights, or mining and surface rights.
2. Co-owners Rick Barclay and George Backes argue the still possess surface rights and Barclay, being suspicious of the BLM, contacted the Oath Keepers to provide security at the mine while he goes through the appeal process with the BLM, telling local news that he did it because he was worried the BLM would remove or destroy their equipment before they could appear in court to appeal.
3. The Oath Keepers call out for volunteers and a bunch of armed people show up.
4. So many Oath Keepers show up that Barclay tells a local newspaper that the operation was becoming an “circus”.
5. Oath Keepers start sending the BLM employees threatening phone calls.
6. And, finally, Barclay and the Oath Keepers deny that there are any parallels with the Bundy Ranch standoff.
Well, we haven’t hadn’t any lectures about “the Negro” yet, so that’s one point of divergence between the Bundy Ranch standoff and Sugar Pine Mine Circus.
We also haven’t seen the flood of support for the miners from elected officials across the nation like we saw with the Bundy Ranch standoff (before they fled) so that’s also something different.
Will these difference remain as the circus goes on? We’ll just have to wait and see. But keep in mind that one of the things the Oath Keepers call for is a return to the gold standard, so a showdown at a gold mine has got to be like crack for Oath Keepers which mean getting the circus to leave town might not be easy.
And then there’s the other golden crackheads that are undoubtedly looking to take a hit...
Oh look, the Sugar Pine Mine “circus” is finally getting its ringleader. Or, at least, a couple of ringleader representatives:
Yep! The Bundy’s are coming to Oregon! Maybe they’ll help protect the paperwork that
Of course, given that the mine owners told the media that the reason for calling in the Oath Keepers when all this started was to prevent BLM official from damaging their equipment at the mine, it doesn’t seem like protecting the appeals paperwork is what any of them have in mind.
Maybe the Bundys will be able to give some advice on how to proceed now that there are representatives on the scene. Or maybe they already have:
“The miners contend they legally control all of the land and resources within the claim, which they said has been continuously mined since the 1800s, predating the Surface Resources Act of 1955, which made future claims apply only to mineral rights...”
Well that sure has a familiar ring to it....
But keep in mind that there are still some significant differences between the Bundy Ranch freak out and the Sugar Pine mine circus: Cliven Bundy called in the Oath Keepers because he was sovereign citizen that’s simply opposed to Federal laws entirely. These mine owners, on the other hand, claim to have merely called in the Oath Keepers to protect their stuff while they await their day in court to appeal BLM’s order.
It raises a rather intriguing question: Does calling in the Oath Keepers for a showdown with the government for arguably less dubious reasons than Cliven’s, but still quite dubious reasons overall, count as progress?
A man named Gavin Long has been identified as the shooter in the ambush-style killing of three Baton Rouge police and injuring of three others. Not surprisingly, Long appears to be associated with an anti-police movement known for violence. More surprisingly, since Long was an African American ex-marine, is that the anti-police movement he was part of is a sovereign citizen offshoot:
“A search of his online postings found that Long told a YouTube audience in a video posted July 10 — a few days after the Dallas sniper shooting — that he had traveled to Dallas and was in the city during the attack that killed five officers. He called the incident “justice.””
Yikes, although note that he doesn’t claim in his Youtube video to actually have been there during the attack in Dallas. Still, you have to if any other black sovereign citizens were in Dallas during the shooting. Especially other members of the “Washitaw Nation of Mu’urs”, the particular sect of the Moorish sovereign citizens Long belonged to.
You also have to wonder about how many other sovereign citizens in general of any race may have been in Dallas during the shooting or the anti-police protests in general. Because as Gavin Long’s demonstrates, the sovereign citizen-influenced kaleidoscope of anti-government ideologies create an ideological meeting point for groups that you wouldn’t normally assume are prone towards cooperation. After all, Cliven Bundy and the Bundy Brigade’s armed standoffs were very much inspired by sovereign citizen-esque philosophies, but Cliven Bundy isn’t the kind of fellow you would expect to have much in common with Gavin “Cosmo” Long.
And yet, as the article below which discusses two Moorish sovereign citizens who were caught plotting police assassination last year points out, the Moorish sovereign citizen movement is among the fastest growing sovereign citizen strains in recent years. So it appears that at least some individuals with a black separatist mindset who you would expect to be turned off by the white-supremacist history of the sovereign citizen movement are still happy to borrow its anti-government ideas:
“Even though the movement was started by white supremacists, what they focused on were anti-government ideas...So with each subsequent decade, white supremacists have become an ever smaller and less important part of the sovereign citizen movement.”
It may be incredibly ironic that the black separatist Moorish sovereign citizens retooled an ideology deeply rooted in white supremacist principles, but it is what it is. Ironic and now tragic after the Baton Rouge ambush. And almost tragic last year too if this previous plot by Moorish sovereigns described above hadn’t been thwarted. It will be interesting to see if Long had any contact with Olajuwon Ali Davis given the several years Davis spent in Kansas City that coincided with the years after Long left the military.
So we have another deadly police ambush by another heavily-armed disturbed individual and there’s no shortage of heavily-armed disturbed individuals in America. While that doesn’t bode well during this period of elevated tensions between police and communities, on the plus side at least the Moorish sovereign movement is so weird and incoherent that it’s likely to have extremely limited appeal. Sure, it’s growing fast in recent years, but that’s in part because it was such a small movement to begin with. Of course, that also means that whoever does join is, at a minimum, a deeply confused individual, and movements concentrated with confused individuals can get scary. Still, given the challenges of preventing armed lunatics from wreaking havoc in heavily armed societies, at least the armed lunatics tend to seem like lunatics the more society gets to know them after they go on their killing sprees. Imagine how much worse it would be if people like Micah X. Johnson or Gavin “Cosmo” Long who are clearly promoting race war memes didn’t seem like unhinged lunatics intent on making a bad situation worse. The current bad situation really would be a lot worse if that was the case.
It’s all a reminder that while it’s incredibly disheartening that these lunatics keep engaging in suicidal killing sprees with the clear intent of poisoning race relations in the US, it’s really quite fortunate that all of these individuals turn out to be obviously unhinged lunatics intent of poisoning race relations in the US. The underlying lunacy that leads to these murder sprees obviously don’t help, but the obviousness of the underlying lunacy sure does in the aftermath.
There was some horrible sovereign citizen-related news this week coming out of Colorado that’s so horrible it’s almost unbelievable: The Rocky Mountain Fur Con just got canceled! Possibly forever! Just when it seems like things can’t get worse in the world, it gets worse.
How did the annual Denver, Colorado convention for ‘furries’ — people who dress up as animals for fun — implode all of a sudden? Well, that’s where the sovereign citizen angle comes in. Along with a neo-Nazi angle. And, yes, both of those angles are also furry angles. Far-right furry angles:
“So-called alt-furries are also organizing offline in groups like the Furry Raiders, which Foxler leads. Although the Furry Raiders “do not have any political agenda or stance as a group,” the group says on its website, many wear the same armband as Foxler. Foxler says he’s never paid much attention to World War II history, and didn’t notice the similarities.”
He didn’t notice the similarities. Bwah! While “Foxler” might be a neo-Nazi in a neo-Nazi Fox’s outfit, he’s clearly a troll at heart. A troll Nazi at heart. And as we just saw, after Foxler’s apparently Fur Con power grab involving the overbooking of the convention hotel rooms and the subsequent twitter spat involving violent threats led to the Denver police’s demands for additional security for the convention, it was Foxler’s apparent sovereign citizen friend on the Fur Con committee who sent a letter to “Deo” — one of Foxler’s critics — banning her from the convention. And he signed the letter with a red fingerprint:
The red fingerprint was just a coincidence and wasn’t a sovereign citizen call sign at all! Uh huh.
So now Denver has lost of little bit of its furry goodness. Possibly forever. And yes, that really all happened. And will presumably happen to furries elsewhere now that Furrydom has become an Alt Right battleground.
It’s all quite sad. And certainly doesn’t bode well for other furry-ish groups out there. At least the Bronies are still maintaining their wholesomeness. Mostly.
Donald Trump gave remarks to the National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service ceremony today, focusing his comments on the dangers facing police. He also declared this week “Police Week” and ordered the White House to be lit in blue. In terms of reaching out to law enforcement it was pretty good optics.
So with the entire week now Police Week, hopefully someone will have a chance to ask Trump this week about his decision (that filled groups like the KKK with glee) to order the Department of Homeland Security’s “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) program to focus exclusively on Islamist violence, to the exclusion of groups like the sovereign citizens and related militia movements. Because that decision probably wasn’t the best way to reduce violence against police:
“To the knowledge of Daryl Johnson, the former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) intelligence analyst, there are no longer any DHS analysts monitoring domestic terrorism full time. (When asked about it, a DHS representative said: “This is a question for the FBI.”)”
Does the DHS have anyone dedicated to monitoring domestic far-right movements like the sovereign citizens? Apparently not and there’s no sign of that changing:
“Though the federal CVE program already devotes almost the entirety of its resources to organizations combatting jihadism, the White House feels that the current name is “needlessly ‘politically correct’”, an anonymous government source told CNN.”
Yes, not only was the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program directed to exclusively focus on Islamists and ignore the biggest threat to cops — far-right movements like the sovereign citizens — but apparently the name “Countering Violent Extremism” was too politically correct because it isn’t also solely focused on Islamists. All in all, there appears to be some sort of political correctness intended to protect the feelings of non-Islamist far-right nut jobs who harbor fond feelings towards militia groups and sovereign citizens and also the feelings of the actual militia and sovereign citizen members.
So while turning the White House blue is a nice touch, it’s important to keep in mind this week that there are much better ways to truly celebrate Police Week. Like, for instance, ending the political correctness that is leading to the systematic deprioritization by law enforcement of the very groups operating within the US that pose the greatest danger towards police. Addressing that would be quite a celebration of Police Week.
Oh look at that: it turns out the gunman who just shot up a Waffle House near Nashville wearing nothing but a jacket, Travis Reinking, is a self-described sovereign citizen. He made this self-declaration last year in DC at the entrance of the White House when he told secret service agents that he needed to see President Trump. During that encounter he also informed the agents that, as a sovereign citizen, he had a right to inspect the grounds. He then took off his tie, balled it into a fist, continued walking toward the White House and told agents they could arrest him if needed, at which point he was indeed arrested.
But Reinking didn’t have a gun on hand when tried to visit Trump, which indicates he probably wasn’t trying to harm the president, which makes sense if the guy considers himself a sovereign citizen given the hero status Trump holds for much of the far right. It’s also worth recalling how the neo-Nazi Parkland, Florida, shooter, Nikolas Cruz, once bragged about writing a letter to Trump and receiving a response. So we appear to have another murderous Trump fan going on rampage.
And as we should expect at this point, Reinking also has an extensive history of mental health issues, including delusions that Taylor Swift had hacked his phone.
So while we don’t yet have a clear motive for the Waffle House shooting, at this point it looks like this case appears has a lot of parallels with Jared Loughner’s attack on Gabby Giffords: a clearly mentally ill person gets seduced by an extremist far right ideology and ends up going on a shooting spree:
“Reinking told agents he needed to see President Trump and defined himself as sovereign citizen who had a right to inspect the grounds, according to an arrest report by the Metropolitan Police Department in D.C. He was arrested on an unlawful entry charge after refusing to leave the area.”
And that declaration of his sovereign citizen status at the White House is just one aspect of his background that indicates he has mental serious mental health issues:
So we’ll see what the story is with this guy as it unfolds. But don’t forget that, while his obvious mental issues will no doubt play a role in his decision to shoot up a Waffle House, the vast, vast majority of mentally ill people aren’t violent.
And that’s why his apparent fascination with the sovereign citizens is an important factor: mental illness on its own doesn’t tend produce violent individuals. Mental illness + violent political ideologies, on the other hand...
It looks like the US Supreme Court is poised to become a far right rubber stamp for at least the next generation following the announced retirement of Justice Kennedy, thus ensuring a deep dysfunction in the US government for decades to come. And now we have reports that the Koch brothers’ front group, Americans for Prosperity, is going to be joining the coalition of political advocacy groups that will be shaping who President Trump nominates to replace Kennedy and selling that nominee to the American public. This coalition will of course be heavily influenced by the far right religious networks that comprise one of the key branches of the American coalition of right-wing power mongers. So the far right rubber stamp that will be directing the direction of US law for decades to come is probably going to involve a hefty dose of massive deregulation for everything except Christian fundamentalist religious whim. In other words, the upcoming American Handmaid’s Tale will be a Koch-friendly tale. Extremely limited government on the wealthy and industry, and hard right social conservatism enshrined in law for the rabble.
So it’s probably worth noting that kind of philosophical legal monstrosity that’s going to emerge from the US Supreme Court in coming decades — where laws intended to protect the public good are largely deemed unconstitutional via a patchwork of questionable far right legal theories, except when there’s a Biblical fundamentalist justification for the law — is eerily similar to the kind of legal philosophy we find in the sovereign citizen movement. As the following SPLC interview of “Judge Anna” lays out, when you examine what the ‘sovereign citizens’ believe, it’s largely the belief that the only valid law is local law ‘common law’ and Biblical Law, and everything else can be ignored as invalid because the US government is illegitimate. Which is basically a more extreme version of much of the right-wing legal movements designed by and for billionaires and theocrats.
It’s more or less a truism that the federal government is largely illegitimate in American right-wing circles thanks to the key role the federal government has played in thwarting the ambitions of billionaires like the Kochs by facilitating things like income taxes, the rise of the New Deal and Great Society safety-net programs, business regulations, and and expanding civil rights. And it’s more or less a truism in right-wing power monger networks that the Biblical fundamentalist worldview should be the official national worldview and affording a special place in the legal framework of the US.
Don’t forget that the libertarianism the Koch’s endorse is very open to the liberty of local communities to create a theocracy as long as the theocracy is business-friendly. And that’s music to a sovereign citizen’s ears. In other words, the oligarch/theocrat coalition agenda that is about to get turbo-charged for the next 50+ years has a great deal of overlap with the sovereign citizen agenda, which is unfortunately going to be worth keeping in mind as the this Supreme Court nomination process plays out. And it’s especially worth keeping in mind on Independence Day, July 4th, because if there’s one thing that truly threatens the independence of the United States at this point it’s a far right worldview that views almost everything the US government does as fundamentally illegitimate. When the very idea of a government with laws and powers to help the poor, address inequities, and protect the public good is declared unconstitutional, there ironically isn’t going to be much independence left because everything will be owned and run by powerful private interests like the Kochs.
Also don’t forget that the John Birch/far right conspiracy worldview that has taken hold in the American right, thanks in large part to the rise of people like Alex Jones who portray the crimes of the powerful that are typically far right in nature as part of left-wing conspiracy, is also heavily overlapping with both the sovereign citizen and Koch worldview that frames most of the growth of post-Civil War US government (all the stuff that helps average people) as fundamentally illegitimate. In all three cases the problems of society are blamed on Progressive policies and framed as part of a communist/socialist/anti-Christian/anti-White conspiracy that has taken over the US government and must be view as illegitimate. The mainstream right-wing worldview in America today and the sovereign citizens have a shocking amount of overlap in a number of key areas.
So with all that in mind, here’s a peak into the world of Judge Anna Riezinger, one of the leading sovereign citizen figures on the internet these days. She has declared herself a judge in the real state of Alaska, not the illegitimate official state of Alaska.
As the article notes, a central tenet of the sovereign citizens is their belief that the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, which granted the freed slaves citizenship by granting citizenship to everyone born on US soil, also ushered in the era of the illegitimate federal government that actually enslaved everyone. Everyone except sovereigns who file the correct paperwork to legally assert their freedom.
And as the article also notes, this fixation on the 14th Amendment has led to the remarkable assertion by sovereigns that the only people in the US obligated to pay federal income taxes is black people. Yep. The way sovereigns see it, the 14th amendment granted the freed slaves citizenship in an illegal United States corporation only. But the sovereigns only recognize states as legitimate governments and therefore only recognize state citizenship. As such, the slaves and their descendant are the only real citizens of that fake illegitimate ‘United States’ that was created by the 14th Amendment. All of the white people at the time were merely tricked into accepting citizenship in this fake illegitimate federal government (basically, Lincoln’s government). Therefore, the logic goes, the only people who are obliged to pay federal income taxes in the Unite States are black people because all the white people should actually consider themselves sovereign nationals and citizens of the real state governments.
As zany as that all sounds, keep in mind the ‘Tenthers’ and the fact that one of the animating legal theories in contemporary right-wing circles is the idea that almost all federal laws are invalid because the 10th Amendment only grants the federal government powers explicitly laid out in the constitution, nullifying almost all federal law. For example, recall how 10th Amendment nullification principles was the rational Ted Cruz used when proposing his “Health Care Compact” scheme to replace Obamacare that he got from the enter for Tenth Amendment Studies at the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation think-tank. Also recall how 10th Amendment nullification is popular the Bundy-friendly Republicans like Kelli Ward of Arizona. And while the ‘Tenthers’ aren’t quite the same of the sovereigns with their ‘14th Amendment ushered in an evil corporation’ fixation (although they heavily overlap), they are both examples of far right ideologies predicated on a particular legal loophole that somehow invalidates almost all federal laws.
And since it’s hard to imagine that the new right-ward quasi-permanent lurch that the US Supreme Court is about to take won’t end up empower the ‘Tenther’ and sovereign citizen legal perspectives in the general sense of viewing the federal government as illegitimate and invalid, the world of the sovereign citizen is suddenly become much more tragically poignant. So here’s an SPLC interview of ‘Judge Anna’, one of the leading lights of the sovereign citizen world.:
“Indeed, Riezinger has new articles on the internet preaching the illegitimacy of the federal, state and local governments near-daily, iterating their imagined crimes and proscribing complex yet vague steps for Americans to escape the yoke of what she believes is an unconstitutional corporation operating in the guise of your government and its officials.”
Anna Riezinger is a constitutional law luminary. At least she is a luminary to the small group of followers who agree to give her legal jurisdiction over them as a judge. A judge who mostly settles disputes.
And note how eerily similar Riezinger’s sales pitch sounds to the what it now the standard GOP meta-message: “You’ve been screwed by an illegitimate tyrannical government which seeks to deprive you of your god-given rights along with your finances; follow our instructions and you can free yourselves from laws you disagree with and stop paying taxes as well.” Isn’t that basically the GOP’s meta-meme at this point?
And if declaring yourself a judge seems overly ambitious, keep in mind that some of these sovereign citizen luminaries end up declaring their own countries. Now that’s ambition:
But a self-declared judge like Riezinger can still engage in all sorts of antics using their self-declared judicial powers. Like when she issued a letter calling for federal agents to arrest President Obama:
Interestingly, when Riezinger recounts the origin of her ‘awakening’ to the realization that the ‘government is a scam’, it goes back to 1974, when Gerald Ford chose Nelson Rockefeller as vice president. And when Riezinger heard that Rockefeller, one of the wealthiest people in the country, paid nothing income taxes during a televised congressional hearing (it turns out she misheared him and he only didn’t pay income taxes in 1970 due to circumstances), she arrived at the conclusion that “something was rotten in Denmark”, which started her down the path to becoming a sovereign citizen luminary. And sure, it would pretty obscene for someone like Nelson Rockfeller to avoid paying income taxes. But it’s also hard to avoid the conclusion that becoming a sovereign citizen in response to billionaires not paying their taxes has got to be one of the worst possible responses to tax unfairness one can imagine. It’s like when people foolishly embrace a low ‘flat tax’ as a mechanism for closing tax loopholes for the wealthy, except much worse:
“Riezinger says she went on to study 125,000 pages of IRS code and manuals years later. “I realized it was my own ignorance one way or another that was going to by my undoing; if there was any undoing to be done, it was going to be because I didn’t figure this out.””
And now you know that reading 125,000 pages of IRS code and manuals isn’t for the faint of heart. For instance, without the proper grounding you might end up fixated on the 14th Amendment and convinced that the government is an evil fake corporate front that illegally granted citizenship to a fake ‘United States’ country after the Civil War and therefore only the descendants of slaves are required to pay income taxes:
“Riezinger and other sovereigns believe they are not United States citizens, but state nationals, because the United States is a corporation illegally governing the republic via a territorial government and a municipal government, whose laws and taxes, including Social Security, are only legally applicable to African Americans and employees of the federal government. Federal and state governments, courts and law enforcement have no jurisdiction over state nationals who’ve extricated themselves from that system in a process they call “redemption.””
White Americans are actually ‘state nationals’ tricked into accepting a fake citizenship under a fake ‘US federal government’ that is a giant corporate hoax perpetrated after the Civil War. There is no ‘United States’, except for federal employees and the descendants of slaves. And once white Americans go through the legal process of “redemption” they are no longer under the jurisdiction of federal and state governments, courts and law enforcement. That’s what Riezinger teaches her adherents and freedom from that kind of “redemption” is one of the primary legal services she offers.
But freeing people from the United States isn’t the only service Riezinger offers her flock. She also adjudicates personal disputes as part of a ‘common law court’, based on her interpretation of the Biblical 10 commandments:
“She describes the work as primarily settlements of property disputes or inheritances (the testament in your family bible is the legal document required in the latter instance).”
So it’s basically a ‘Sharia for Christians’ service. And it’s a service that any American (who happens to be white) can apparently offer any other American (who also happens to be white). All they have to do is educate themselves on the mysteries of American common law vs Admiralty law, declare themselves a judge, and find a bunch of people who agree to recognize their judicial authority.
Of course, self-declared sovereign judges like Riezinger might not limit their judicial actions to ‘redeeming’ people from their false enslavement to the ‘United States’ corporation. They also have a predilection for declaring government officials as treasonous, which is what “The People’s Grand Jury” did in Colorado recently. Led by Bruce Doucette, one of Riezinger’s rival self-declared judges, a group of eight sovereigns threatened dozens of elected officials and judges across the state. And as we’ve seen before, when sovereign citizens start throwing around treason allegations, calls for public hangings are implied. It’s one of those times when the sovereigns go from unnerving role-players to public threats:
But the sovereigns aren’t just feuding with a government they see as illegitimate. They of course also feud with each other, as Riezinger an Doucette have been doing:
It’s a sovereign guru free for all!
Which, if course, is exactly what we should expect from a movement that assumes every random person can declare themselves a legal judge based on a self-declared superior knowledge of arcane legal theories. If it wasn’t for the existence of the United States government as a unifying force it’s hard to imagine a nation of sovereigns wouldn’t immediately descend into a civil war.
And as the following article describes, sovereign civil was is sort of what happened to Anna Riezinger this year when John Harold Fulks, the self-declared “Governor for the Government of The United States of America” signed an arrest warrant for Riezinger, her husband, and the operator of a conspiracy website in response to claims Riezinger made online last year. According to Fulks, Riezinger told her followers that the General Post Office, an “agency” of Fulks’s “Government of The United States of America”, was gathering an “army” and planning to invade Riezinger’s self-declared nation of the “Continental united States of America”. Yep, that happened.
So Riezinger warns that Fulks’s rival fake sovereign nation is about invade her own fake sovereign nation, and Fulks responds with a fake arrest warrant. Which, again, is exactly what we should expect from a movement based on the idea of random groups can just declare their own nations on a whim:
“The practice of sovereign citizens founding their own pretend governments is fairly common. Sovereign citizens believe that the U.S. government has been illegitimate since the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and the end of the gold standard. They believe both events turned the United States into a corporation and its citizens into corporate slaves.”
Yes you too can start your own government. It’s a pretty nifty sales pitch for a movement. But as we can see, that sales pitch comes with a downside: all those new governments might go to war with each other:
And note how the arrest warrant called for the possible use of deadly force, which is a reminder that this isn’t just really intense LARPing. If it was just really intense LARPing that would be pretty impressive:
So Riezinger warns her followers that this rival government was building an army to invade them, and the rival government issues an arrest warrant that calls for the possible use of deadly force. So how does ‘judge’ Riezinger respond to this escalation of sovereign antics? By declaring that the rival pretend nation is a bunch of “whackjobs” because they think they can simply declare their own government by claiming possession of the abandoned name ‘The United States of America’. Which is an ironically valid point by Riezinger:
“Unfortunately, there are a lot of ignorant people out there.” Indeed.
So as we can see, with the sovereign citizens we have a movement that views the post-Civil War US government as fundamentally illegitimate and a crime against white Americans. And this movement offers a solution that promises to free people from having to pay taxes or follow any law other than their personal interpretation of common law. It’s certainly hard to ignore the parallels to contemporary Republican Party.
And it’s hard to ignore the reality that the US Supreme Court is now poised to veer toward this fundamental view that most US laws (especially those involves taxes, regulations, and protections for minorities) are illegitimate with the notable exception of laws based on a Christian fundamentalist interpretation of Biblical law.
Sure, the Trump/Koch/Alex Jones Supreme Court of the next 50 years is presumably going to be unfriendly towards the idea of people declaring their own governments which is very different from the sovereigns, but that’s to be expected. And neither would Riezinger or Fulks be super pleased if one of the members of their own self-declared governments decided to form a new self-declared government. A utopian society that’s constantly splintering, down to potentially societies of ‘one’, isn’t going to remain a society for very long. It’s going to be a neighborhood of bitter rival nations at war with each other, as we can see.
And that incompatibility of perpetually splintering societies with the very concept of society points towards one of the aspects of governance that both the sovereigns and the Kochs don’t seem to grasp: one of the primary purposes of society is figuring out how we can all live together better and breaking up into rival nations is kind of the opposite of that. Exceptions apply, of course, like the situation the American colonist faced during the Revolutionary War when they were literally fighting for the idea of democracy and a government ‘run by and for the people’ (ignoring the moral abomination of slavery). But once you have a democracy in place, the idea of just balkanizing due to seemingly irreconcilable differences over policy matters and cultural issues suddenly becomes morally outrageous. The idea that we are morally obliged to figure out how to live together in a way that works out well for everyone is an idea that appears to escape extremists of all sorts, whether it’s sovereign citizens, theocratic authoritarians, or authoritarian ‘libertarian’ billionaires like the Kochs.
It’s all a reminder that the only form of societal extremism truly compatible with a stable and successful democracy is a society that takes extremely seriously the challenge of creating a society that’s enjoyable and just life for as many people as possible. And, yes, the sovereigns and Kochs will undoubtedly choose to reject and undermine such a society, but that’s all part of the challenge. A challenge to society to keep its independence by continually becoming more self-aware and just and understanding and nice (and maybe adopts some federal programs to implement some of those nice goals). Because that sounds like an extremely desirable society and an extremely desirable society should only need one Independence Day.
And there’s another mass shooting in America. The second one in Texas for the month of August. Yesterday’s shooting spree in Odessa, TX, that left seven dead, including the gunman, and 22 injured was the 283rd mass shooting in America in 2019. There have only been 244 days in 2019 so far. So it’s an typical everyday American story. That’s the US in 2019.
But we still don’t know yet if it this was a typical American mass shooting story because we don’t know anything about the motive or the shooter’s political beliefs. We know the shooter was, Seth Aaron Ator, a 36 year old white male. That’s pretty typical for these kinds of stories. We know he worked as a truck driver and lived an some sort of shack or building without electricity or running water, which isn’t really typical. And while one of his neighbors says Ator kept to himself, another woman recounts him yelling at her for leaving trash in a nearby dumpster while holding a rifle. He also failed a background check and had a criminal record. So it sounds like he probably had severe anger management issues or some sort of personality disorder and a history of violence which is definitely typical for shooters, but no one appears to have discovered anything about his beliefs or politics.
Part of what adds to the mystery of his motivations is the fact that the shooting appeared to spontaneously happen when he was pulled over in his truck for a failure to signal and suddenly opened fire on the police. It was at that point that he went on an indiscriminate shooting spree. It’s the kind of scenario that could have been triggered by a number of motivations. And now we’ve learned that he was fired from his trucking job hours before the traffic stop. Job loss is certainly a common trigger for mass violence, but in those cases it’s typically directed at the company that did the firing. So unless Ator was literally heading back to his work place to shoot it up when the police happened to pull him over, it’s unclear why his lost job earlier that day would have triggered an attack on police and general public. The firing does raise the probability that the traffic stop was an event that caused the guy to psychologically snap.
But even if this was a shooting spree that wasn’t premeditated or ideological in nature but triggered by a job loss, there’s still the question of whether or not this guy was immersed in the world of far right propaganda now available to everyone online where mass killing sprees are gleefully celebrated. Lots of people ‘snap’ at some point. Almost none of them go on violent killing sprees when they do. So for someone to start randomly shooting at the people around him after snapping suggests mass murdering the public is something he’s thought about doing many times before. And that again brings up the question of whether or not he was consuming the kind of far right content online where mass murder sprees are glorified.
Of course, it’s also very possible the guy ‘snapped’ from the job loss and was also a far right ideologue. Perhaps the guy was a far right ‘sovereign citizen’ who didn’t recognize law enforcement and opened fire on the police like so many sovereign citizens have done before. And while the sovereign citizen ideology doesn’t direct explain why he would proceed to shoot random people too, we can’t forget the larger context of a far right internet culture that celebrate murder spree killers and encrypted apps where open solicitation of neo-Nazi domestic terror takes place. We also can’t forget that this far right internet culture that celebrate murder spree killers is a direct product of a neo-Nazi campaign to promote a ‘leaderless resistance’ campaign of terrorism designed to foment the kind of Nazi takeover scenario described in The Turner Diaries where gun control is the rallying cry for getting white America on the side of the Nazi underground. A strategy of endless waves of neo-Nazi shooting sprees intended to bring about gun control legislation, at which point the Nazis win over the sympathies of most of white America and wage a race war. Recall how Stephen Paddock appeared to be a sovereign citizen who spoke of the need for ‘sacrifices’ to be made to ‘wake people up’ because “somebody has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves”, the kind of rhetoric that would be consistent with a far right nut job who goes on to shoot up a festival after binging on neo-Nazi propaganda that tells him the best way to bring about a race war is to force America to finally implement meaningful gun control laws by waging one seemingly senseless shooting spree after another.
It’s also important to keep in mind that that far right internet cultures that celebrate mass murderers — whether its the neo-Nazis or Incels or ISIS — all play into that neo-Nazi ‘gun control triggers race war’ takeover strategy laid out in The Turner Diaries regardless of whether or not those internet cultures explicitly promote a white supremacist ideology. Simply encouraging a shooting spree furthers the Nazi strategy even if the shooter isn’t a Nazi. In fact, it’s probably a lot better for the Nazis if the shooter isn’t an open far right nut job. Except at least some of the shooters need to be Nazis with manifestos in order to promote the ‘leaderless resistance’ model and attract more disturbed individuals willing to commit mass murder to the movement. So this strategy of promoting mass shooting sprees in order to bring about strong gun control laws in the hopes of triggering a white nationalist insurrection forces the Nazi underground to walk a strange line of having to celebrate these shooting sprees while simultaneously denying culpability or deflecting blame. It requires a lot of ‘target marketing’ over the internet and encrypted chat networks.
And that’s all why whenever one of these shooting sprees happen it’s important to publicly point out that the far right is planning on using as a trigger for a white nationalist insurrection the gun control laws that America inevitably will implement in response to this seemingly endless string of shooting sprees. That’s literally their strategy, based on The Turner Diaries. And it’s a strategy that can’t really work if it’s widely known that it’s their strategy. It requires society at large not realizing that the far right is promoting this terror spree because it’s a strategy predicated on eventually convincing white America that the Nazis are the good guys. It’s hard to claim the ‘good guy’ mantel when your ideology is shown to be behind random acts of mass murder as a persuasion tactic.
It’s also important to realize that this Nazi strategy of using gun control laws as a rallying cry for a white nationalist insurrection and race war really relies on the broader right-wing media playing along with that strategy. The more we find Fox News, Breitbart, and the broader mainstream right-wing media adopt white nationalist narratives — narratives like conservative whites being under assault by a diabolical conspiracy of everyone else while fetishizing guns and portraying gun control as a mortal threat to the republic or the demonization of Latinos as an invading force flooding the country as part of a globalist plot — the more likely that Nazi strategy of shooting sprees in the furtherance of race war will work. The dramatic popularization of far right content in conservative media in the internet age made the Turner Diaries gun control/race war strategy a much more viable strategy. But it’s only viable if it’s not widely recognized by the public that this is happening because spree killers are hard to rally behind unless you’re already a Nazi.
So whether or not Seth Aaron Ator was a far right nut job, the fact is that his actions played into an ongoing far right strategy of using senseless mass terror, and the gun control backlash to that terror, as a cynical trigger for a race war. A cynical trigger that only works if it’s not widely recognized as being a cynical trigger. So with that need to expose this cynical ‘leaderless resistance’ strategy in mind, it’s also worth noting the unusual opportunity America has right now for getting the national discourse on gun laws out of the current cycle of despair. Because one of the organizations that’s done the most in recent years to mainstream the kinds of white nationalist memes critical for that Nazi strategy of trigger a race war after gun strong control laws — memes like the idea that gun control laws are part of a ‘globalist’ left-wing plot under the direction of George Soros and memes like there is no problem with neo-Nazi domestic terror attacks in America — is in the middle of a giant internal power struggle surrounding that messaging campaign: the National Rifle Association is melting down and at the heart of the meltdown is a battle over whether or not the organization should be a far right propaganda outlet.
As the following New York Times article from back in March describes, the creation of NRATV in 2016, which turned the NRA into a Breitbart-like media outlet, was sort of the culmination of the NRA’s transformation from a group into an overly hyper-political hard right organization that had been going on for years. The NRA was now an organization with a TV channel that pumps out propaganda that paints the political left as an existential threat to the United States and gun control laws as part of a diabolical plot that could destroy America. NRATV was putting out exactly the kind of narrative that plays into a far right plot to use strong gun control laws as a trigger for a white nationalist insurrection.
As the article also describes, Ackerman McQueen — the media consultancy group that shaped this rebranding of the NRA from a lobby focused on rights for hunters and sport shooters into a hard right political entity that frames gun control debates in near apocalyptic terms — has been paid handsomely for these services and appears to have had an incestuous revolving door financial relationship with a number of NRA officials including Wayne LaPierre’s wife. Improper relationships with Ackerman McQueen are a big part of what the current NRA civil war is all about. But part of it also appears to be driven by a real conflict in the organization over whether or not it should be producing hyper-partisan media content like NRATV at all.
Ackerman McQueen has had been a close NRA partner since the 1980’s. This year there’s been a complete falling out with the NRA. Ackerman McQueen has been fired and sued by the NRA for a variety of reasons It’s a dispute that’s pitted Wayne LaPierre against Oliver North, with LaPierre claiming North tried to extort him . The NRA even sued Ackerman McQueen again a few days ago demanding Ackerman McQueen remove from their website any suggestion of positive associations with the NRA. So it’s possible that the NRA might stop portraying the gun control debate on issues like assault weapons as a ‘life and death’ apocalyptic issue for the United States. Given the important role the NRA has been playing in mainstream and popularizing the general white nationalist worldview that encourages these shooting sprees, the fact that there’s an opportunity for this to change is a pretty big deal. Imagine if the NRA was the kind of organization that made it clear to America’s gun owners that one of the biggest threats to their gun rights is the far right propaganda network that popularizes mass shooting sprees in the hopes of bringing about gun control laws that they hope will trigger a race war, instead of a echoing those white nationalist narratives on NRATV. And just two months ago, it was announced NRATV has was shutting down. So there’s a rare opportunity right now to maybe finally turn the NRA into the kind of organization that doesn’t play right into the neo-Nazi plans of using gun control law as a white nationalist rallying cry:
“Whatever happens to NRATV, few expect the N.R.A. to become much less combative. Mr. LaPierre, in a speech this month, described the organization’s approach as “full-contact advocacy,” adding, “We are going to fight back against anyone who attempts to silence us.””
Sadly, it’s true that there’s little reason to expect the NRA to become much less combative. Even with NRATV shutdown after starting in 2016, the core of the leadership is going to remain after this power struggle, which is extra sad given that the NRA’s idea of being ‘combative’ has been to adopt the white nationalist narratives to frame gun control laws as part of a globalist attack on white America and warning of race wars. When Dana Loesch triggered the ire of the NRA’s leadership after an NRATV skit that portrayed “Thomas & Friends” in Klan hoods, she was pushing a classic far right meme, where the anti-racists are the real bigots. And when NRATV host Chuck Holton was promoting the idea that Honduran caravans last year were part of a George Soros plot to influence the 2018 mid-terms he was pushing a narrative right out of the Nazi playbook. But that’s also why any improvement at the NRA would still be helpful...being less harmful is relatively helpful:
“Why are we getting so involved in left-right politics instead of sticking close to our issue, the Second Amendment?” That appears to be the core question the NRA’s leadership has been struggling with. Keep in mind that part of the justification for getting involved in left-right politics is that doing so allows the NRA to frame its arguments in the kinds of all encompassing apocalyptic white nationalist terms that frame gun control as the kind of issue that a civil war could and should be fought over. That’s part of what makes the NRATV strategy so sinister: it’s a gun control lobbying choosing to lobby by framing the issue in a manner that makes any meaningful gun control legislation as the kind of threat to the country that warrants any level of resistance. It’s an absolutely perfect narrative for a Turner Diaries strategy fueling these shooting sprees.
But despite the odds of any significant shift away from a far right narrative at the NRA, the fact that Ackerman McQueen has split from the NRA still represents the best chance for a significant shift at the NRA that we’ve seen in years:
So let’s hope this NRA leadership feud continues because it sounds like it’s generally pushing the organization in the right direction. Although it seems possible a further purge could end up throwing out the faction that wants to turn away from the hyper-partisan propaganda. We’ll see. But as long as the NRA is going to run rhetorical cover for the far right and portray the gun control debate in precisely the manner that assists a Turner Diaries Nazi insurrection scenario, it’s going to be worth pointing out that the NRA would be doing a better job protecting gun rights if it wasn’t routinely running rhetorical cover for the far right strategy that promotes mass shootings in order to force gun control laws as part of a Nazi takeover strategy. In other words, the NRA would be a better lobby for gun owners if it actually pointed out and denounced the Nazi shooting spree strategy instead of assisting it.