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Oct 14, 20204 min read

What are American militias?

By: Kay Rollins



Chris Hill, better known as “Blood Agent,” spends his days practicing weapons training, disaster preparedness, and combat drills with his troops. But Chris and his forces aren’t in Afghanistan or Iraq; they are in Georgia.


As he told Vox News in 2017, Chris’ group, the Georgia Three Percenters security force, promises to be ready to defend the Constitution against all threats — foreign and most importantly, domestic.


However, there are thousands of others like Chris that are part of the growing numbers of “patriots'' in the American militia movement: an ideology dedicated to pro-gun, anti-government, and often white-supremacist extremism. Far from just being a set of views, the movement itself is shockingly organized, composed of organizations like the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys (who Trump told to “stand by” in the first presidential debate), Three Percenters, Minutemen, and dozens of other localized forces. As of 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified 576 operational extremist anti-government groups, 181 of which are designated as militias.


Although few Americans will recognize the names of these groups, most have seen them in action in the last six months. Many heavily armed anti-lockdown protesters in April and May were identified as Three Percenters and Oath Keepers. More alarmingly, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin last month, also considered himself part of a local militia group.


While these groups are far from unified, militia members like Chris Hill and Kyle Rittenhouse all share a similar distrust in the federal government, a belief that reaches back into the militia movement’s early days in the 1990s. In 1993, the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms Bureau (ATF) conducted a siege on the Branch Davidian religious compound in Waco, Texas, where the cult was suspected of arms trafficking and child sexual abuse. To many suspicious Americans, this was a major overreach of the federal government, intended to stamp out a cult rather than enforce laws. The failures of the government during the siege only confirmed their beliefs. During the 51 day siege in 1993, over 50 people died, sparking widespread backlash and leading to a sharp rise in militia membership.


The Waco siege, coupled with other events of violence by the ATF, along with other branches of the government, was what the militia movement had been waiting for. Even 20 years later, the standoff at Waco is still a rallying cry for militia members. The Oath Keepers’ founder, Stephen Rodes, told reporters that if the federal government didn’t stay away from anti-government groups in Oregon in 2016, there would be another “Waco” and a “brutal, bloody civil war.”


These groups aren't just collections of people who are suspicious of the Feds — militias have a long history of violence, much of which comes from conspiratorial ideas. Militia groups are heavily influenced by theories like the “new world order”, believing that there is a totalitarian world government (likely run through the United Nations) that seeks to take away all weapons, voting rights, and autonomy from the citizens of the planet. Although not all militia groups or members buy into this theory, most members are widely distrustful of federal or international oversight and believe that they need to be heavily armed to fight back against these potential threats.


Combining “heavily armed” civilians with trigger happy beliefs has been a recipe for violence. For example, in 1995, anti-government extremist Timothy Mcveigh killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City Bombing, targeting a federal office building to send his message. Although Mcveigh himself was not part of a militia group, he was inspired by them and his actions are undeniably a consequence of the rise of the militia movement. Mcveigh wasn’t an isolated incident either. Last year, another militia member, Jerry Drake Varnell, a 3 Percenter affiliate, tried to replicate McVeigh’s attack.


Unfortunately, even though alt-right groups like militias represent the single largest terrorist threat in the US, the media often sympathizes with them. Take the Bundy Family, an anti-federal extremist family who got into a standoff with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) over where their cattle could feed. As expected, the standoff was heavily publicized by websites like InfoWars, which already lean towards anti-government, conspiratorial stories.


However, unlike Waco or Ruby Ridge before it, the Bundy incident attracted more mainstream sympathy through channels like Fox news. Less than 2 weeks after the BLM set up base in Clark County, Sean Hannity interviewed Cliven Bundy, and days later, Hannity began his show with a 20 minute, Friday night segment on Bundy, playing a video of protesters being tased by federal agents on loop. Greta Van Susteren, another Fox anchor, challenged viewers to answer a poll asking if they were “Team Cliven Bundy or Team Federal Government,” where 97% of the thousands of respondents were team Cliven. By publicizing and even praising Cliven, Fox gave a platform for the extremist positions of militia members and therefore played a key role in radicalizing their viewers.


Unfortunately, these militia groups are spreading. They are using anti-government anger to recruit online, expanding their illegal law enforcement actions across American cities, and are, without a doubt, incredibly dangerous. In some ways, these militia groups are right. Many threats to our country are domestic, not foreign. But instead of protecting America, militia members are the ones threatening it, making our country less safe and more divided.


Discussion Questions:

  • How can the federal government combat the growth of militias?

  • Why is Trump defending alt-right militias?

  • Should Americans be worried about growing ties between militias and law enforcement?

  • Should the three percenters be deemed a terrorist organization?

  • How can social media websites counter militia expansion?


Sources Used/Further Reading:




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