Angry Planet - Inside America’s armed militias and the new civil war

Episode Date: October 5, 2016

Depending on where you live, this story will either be shocking or old hat. But even if you have an armed "militia" operating near you, you probably don't realize just how developed these states within a state have become - and how far they've drifted from the majority of American society.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. They would trick police officers, kidnap them, take them to an abandoned home where they'd already set up a place to shackle them and torture them. And the whole point was you put these officers on trial for treason, you find them guilty, and then you kill them. On this show, we talk about some pretty intense stuff.

Religion, politics, weapons, war, and some of the atrocities that come with war. Much of what we discuss is happening far from the United States. This week's episode is different. It literally hits close to home, especially if you live in certain parts of the United States. The world of militias and sovereign individuals was shocking to me. I live in New York. Co-host, Matthew Galt, who lives in Texas, laughed at me for being so surprised. But even Matt didn't realize how militarized America's divisions have become.

You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Jason Fields and Matthew Galt. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields with Reuters. And I'm Matthew Galt with Wars Boring. J.J. McNabb is an expert on domestic violent extremism and a fellow at George Washington University's Center for Cyber and Homeland Security. She's also a consultant to various government agencies where her expertise helps keep America's safe.

Can we just start off with talking about the various distinct types of groups you're monitoring? They're not all the same, right? Let's step back a little bit. There is one overall group that I monitor. They go by the general name of just anti-government extremists. Within that group, there are different subsets, and sovereign citizen is one of those subsets. So you have this kind of big umbrella group, and within there you may have eight or nine subgroups that overlap. So there is a general group, though, and it's important to make that distinction because there are people in the movement that aren't necessarily in one of the subsets.

They're just kind of floating around in the gray area around the subsets. And that group that is not quite belonging to any subgroup is very important because a lot of the violence comes from them. So, for example, you wrote a piece not long ago detailing a couple who had actually fallen out with a particular group, the Cliven Bundy group, and we can talk a little bit more about that. but they had been kicked out of the group and actually were more violent than the group they were trying to hook up with. Is that kind of what you're talking about? That's what I'm talking about. And even if you go back in history, if you look at someone like Timothy McVeigh, he was definitely part of the Patriot Movement, which is what it was called back then, but he wasn't in the militia. He wasn't a sovereign citizen like Terry Nichols was.

He wasn't in any particular subgroup. He was just kind of on the outskirts. And I think the same thing happened with a couple that murdered those police officers in Las Vegas in 2014. They didn't really belong anywhere. And when they tried to join a subgroup, they tried to join the Cliven Bundy militia, they were kicked out. And they lost all sense of community. I think that actually is a problem. And a lot of the violent extremism comes from people who don't have a community or an outlet.

But what exactly does it mean for someone to be a sovereign citizen? The sovereign citizen is the judicial part of the movement. If you think of the entire movement as trying to recreate the U.S. government, you have a judiciary. The sovereign citizens are the judicial side. They're the ones that make all of the legal arguments. They play lawyer. They have their own common law courts. They believe that by piecing together bits and pieces of laws, they can put themselves above all laws.

And there's a lot of irony in that because they're relying on the laws of the U.S. government to prove, that the U.S. government is illegitimate. But at the heart, they're just basically anarchists. If you can pick and choose which laws you obey and which ones you ignore, you're effectively an anarchist. Okay, so then kind of following that track, the CSPOA and the Continental Marshals are the law enforcement? Right. And the CSPOA,

the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, is interesting because those are actual sheriffs. Those are people who have been elected in the office at the county level throughout the nation. You know, there are an estimated 3,000 sheriffs, roughly 10% of them belong to this group. So they would be the law enforcement side. The militia would be the military side. The tax protesters would be the monetary side. As the movement grows, they are differentiating to the point where they are recreating a U.S. government.

How do the ones that are actual law enforcement, actual elected sheriffs, reconcile their jobs with being a part of this larger movement? The constitutional sheriffs, and that's what they call themselves, the constitutional sheriffs don't understand they're part of the movement. They have absorbed a significant amount of legal information or pseudo-legal information that was part of the posse comitatis movement of the 1970s. They just think it's true. They don't know that it's alternative. They don't know that it's fringe. They just think that they know more than the rest of us. And that it's powerful.

They've been told by the promoters that put this thing together that, they are the highest law enforcement officer in the land because they are elected, and therefore they are above the hierarchy over any federal agent or employee, and that they have the ability, for example, if an IRS agent is in their county, auditing someone, they have the ability to go in by force, if necessary, and remove the IRS agent from their county. Have there been any notable incidents that you would point out, and are there any notable sheriffs who fall under it? Someone like, let's say, Joe Arpaio in Arizona, I mean, is he, would he be part of that? Joe Arpaio is part of it in Arizona. Sheriff Clark in Milwaukee is part of it. Both of them

spoke at the recent Republican convention. It became a really big issue during the Malia refuge takeover in Oregon in January because the sheriff that was part of that county is not part of the movement, but the sheriff in the next county over is. And so when the Grant County Sheriff was meeting with the militants and providing them with information and it got to the point where dispatch couldn't even tell their own sheriff something because they didn't trust him not to take it back to the militia. And it's also a big issue because when you have sheriffs that believe in these things, sheriffs that don't are put at risk.

If you're being told that if you're just a person in the movement, just a general person in the movement and you've been told that the sheriffs are on your side, any sheriff that isn't on your side is seen as committing treason and a punishment for treason is death. And they believe, or some people inside these groups believe that they can contain the entire judicial process within themselves, meaning that they pass summary judgment or do they have moot courts? I mean, or moot courts are the wrong term, but what do they do? There's multiple steps.

Some steps are slow. For example, they might put a redress of grievances before the county sheriff and say, these are all the things that we think are wrong. These are the things, you know, these are the people we think are breaking the laws, go and arrest them. And if they don't get what they want, for example, the sheriff is not one of the constitutional sheriffs, then they might form a common law grand jury, an alternative jury in which they just pick and choose their friends to form a jury. they might try to get the sheriff or the U.S. Marshals to arrest the person they want to put on trial. That doesn't happen.

And when they can't, they may try to kidnap the person themselves or more likely put the person on trial in absentia. And the only trial they have is for treason because it's the only crime that's actually listed in the Constitution. It's a grand jury that kind of sounds and looks and feels like the normal grand jury, the same number of jurors, that type of thing. completely extra legal. It's completely outside of our system. And that came powerfully close to happening in Las Vegas a couple years ago. You had two people who decided that the cops, the police officers in Las Vegas were violating their constitutional rights, everyone's constitutional rights. So they decided to set a trap. They would trick police officers, kidnap them, take them to an abandoned home where they'd already set up a place to shackle them and torture them.

And the whole point was you put these officers on trial for treason, you find them guilty, and then you kill them. If we can talk a little bit more about scale, how widespread something like this is, because while this sounds terrifying, is this a common occurrence? Are there, you mentioned hundreds of thousands of people, how committed are those hundreds of thousands of people? or are we talking about much smaller numbers here? And are there particular parts of the country where it's more likely? Scale is a little difficult to tell. There are many people in the movement. My estimate is about 300,000, but most of those aren't violent.

Most of those are not plotting to arrest and kidnap people. Most of them are simply disenfranchised Americans who are trying really hard to change what they don't like. Violent-wise, I think we had a test with the Clive and Bundy standoff to see how many people would actually show up. And you had about 1,500 people that participated in the standoff during the standoff itself and over the next few weeks. But you had approximately 125,000 people that were watching it online and expressing interest and expressing support. My guess is that you have a few thousand people willing to go violent and all the rest are simply effectively changed. That kind of speaks to something I wanted to get into a little bit. I was wondering how the internet has changed these movements. So, you know, it's a fairly recent phenomenon and kind of how

it's affected things. It's made it so that instead of fax trees, I don't know if you remember those from the 90s, where if you were an extremist and you needed to communicate to other extremists, you would send 10 faxes and each of the people you faxed would send another 10 faxes. Instead of having that extremely long and tedious process, you can now reach 100,000 with a click of a button. But for the internet, I don't think this movement would exist right now. It's kind of interesting because this is the second part, the second cycle of this movement. It started in the 1960s as tax protesters, and then it built in the 1970s as Pasi Comitatus. Then it moved into the Christian Patriot Movement.

Then it moved into the militia movement, and it ended with McVeigh. Timothy McVeigh. And the movement died. It just went flat after McVeigh. And it's interesting because it started up again in the late 1990s, once again, as the tax protest movement. And then it moved into the sovereign citizen movement, which is comparable to the Pasi Cometatus of the 1970s. And we're with Cliven Bundy, we're now into the militia movement. My fear is that we're going into the rest of the cycle, which is Timothy McVeigh. But where the internet mattered is the first group was so much smaller. The first cycle was so much smaller, and it took a good 35 years to go through the entire cycle. It's much faster now and much, much larger thanks to the internet.

So we use the word militia a lot. It's used very commonly in the media. And my understanding of militia, at least in the United States, is that there's some legal status to a militia. But that's not at all what we're talking about when we talk about the Michigan militia or the other militias. That's correct. There are no legal militias in this group. They are actually private paramilitary groups. Many states even have laws on the book that make militias as we see them at, for example,

Bundy Ranch illegal. The groups don't really care. In fact, in the 1970s, when they were first starting to form these private paramilitary groups, They didn't even call themselves militias. That kind of came about in the 1980s. What they do is they co-opt words from the past in order to make themselves look more legitimate. Even the word that label sovereign citizen is co-opted from the past. In the early 1800s, it just meant voter.

And today it means something very, very different. Militia, up until the Civil War, meant something very, very different than it does today. And so they take on labels in order to make themselves look and feel like they are legitimate. and they believe those labels. So, and you also have the word militia in the Constitution itself. Yes. It sounds like more what we're saying, when you say militia in this case, it's not so different than a militia inside Ukraine that is fighting against the authorities from Kiev.

I mean, it's a group of people who are armed and have no official state sanction, but who functioned together. It's not all that different than a gang. If you look at the individual components, for example, of the three percenters, which is a very unorganized group. They have their own hand signals. They wear colors. They have. It is very much like gangs.

There's a reason why the nickname these days for them is not militia members. It's militants. And that would be true in someplace like Ukraine or wherever. They just give themselves names. They give themselves uniforms. They give themselves ranks in order to look in. feel like the real thing. They seem to be obsessed with status, but status that they give themselves, but it imitates these status symbols that they say that they don't like from the federal government.

And I'm wondering if you find that stranger what you think that's about. They really truly want to be legitimate. They want to recreate the U.S. government in the way they like it. They also believe that the government is going to collapse, whether it's through martial law or, you know, financial meltdown or war or whatever, they truly believe the government is about to fall apart, and they want to be ready to replace it. And so they have the look and feel of an alternative government. There's even one organization called the Republics for the United States that actually has a president, a vice president, a cabinet, Supreme Court justices, marshals, senators and congressmen all ready to go. So it sounds like a post-apocalyptic

science fiction story, really. Do people just watch too much walking dead, falling skies? I think Jericho was the one they really liked. No, it's, and it, there's a, they do love science fiction as well. They're driven primarily by conspiracy theories, and that's, that's really important to take note of. If you believe, for example, that when the U.S. military did the Jade Helm exercises in, in the South this last, last year, if you truly believe that they're doing that in order to take over the government, take over the nation through martial law, then every time you see a military guy walking down the street, you're paranoid. They live in fear. They're driven by anger, but they live in fear. Can we talk a little bit about the links to white supremacy or other

hate movements? I think there's sometimes an assumption that these two are the same thing. That's a really important question. In the 1960s, this group was formed in response to the Civil Rights Act. It was started by white supremacist leaders in Southern California. A lot of people think it started in the South. It didn't. It was started in Southern California by a white supremacist reverend. He packaged it and he brought together what he thought would be constitutional sheriffs and all of that in order to get around the Civil Rights Act.

It was a white nationalist, white supremacist organization when it started. Aryan Nations was a spinoff of this group. I mean, this was hardcore white supremacy. And that started to splinter off in the 90s before McVeigh. And when the movement fell apart after McVeigh and it regrouped and it came back in the late 90s, early 2000s, the white supremacy side of the movement was gone. In fact, when you talk to today's sovereign citizens or today's militias, they don't even know their own history. They don't know that the legal theory is there relying on were dreamt up by white supremacists. And that becomes particularly interesting when you consider the fastest growing segment of this movement are black Americans. And so you'll have an African

American who gets up in court and starts talking about 14th Amendment citizens and all of these legal schemes. He doesn't even know that he's parroting something that was come up, that was fabricated by a white supremacist leader. And if you go to a militia meeting or if you go to the Blyvin Bendy standoff, or if you go to any of their places where they meet, I think you'd be surprised at how multiracial it is, that you have black, you have white, you have Asian, you have Hispanic, you have male, you're female, it's not your stereotypical white supremacist group anymore. And I think a lot of the academics who are now taking interest in the movement again don't understand that. And they're simply saying, okay, this is a white supremacist group because

that's what it was before Timothy McVey-McBey in the 90s. Well, can we talk about the Clive and Bundy standoff to give us a specific example? Talk a little bit about who was there and also law enforcement's response. Clive and Bundy was really interesting. Had Clive and Bendy's standoff occurred two years earlier, he wouldn't have had any support. There were two things going on. One of them was Clive and Bundy who had not paid his grazing fees in 20 years. So his cattle were effectively trespassing on federal land.

And they were trespassing on land that was roughly the size of a small state, 1,200 square miles. And he didn't want to pay, and he had all these beliefs that were kind of from the earlier Sagebrush Rebellion of the 70s and 90s, that the land shouldn't be owned by federal government. It should be owned by the state and the county. It was just very bad luck for the federal government that the standoff occurred when it did, because at that point, the sovereign movement, sovereign citizen movement, the militia movement, all of them were agitating for a conflict, for a confrontation with the federal government. They didn't really care what the core issue was.

For example, one of the first attempts to generate a standoff was in Arizona, where one of the groups decided that when someone was arrested at a city meeting, council meeting, that that was martial law and therefore martial law had been declared, it was time for everybody to go to Arizona and stand up against the government. A more recent one to Cliven Bundy was a case in West Virginia where a young boy was arrested for having a Second Amendment T-shirt in his school. I don't think he was arrested. He was sent home from school.

And that was seen as, okay, that's violation of First and Second Amendment. Everybody go to West Virginia and stand. up. There had been multiple attempts to get everyone together on the same page in order to form an armed confrontation with the government. They weren't ready yet until the spring of 2014 so that when the call went out, hey, this rancher needs help, all of a sudden everyone was ready. And it was just bad luck for the government that that's when they happened to do the roundup. If it hadn't been Cliven Bundy, it would have been someone else because the movement was that right. And Cliven Bundy's cattle, the group that showed up, the militias that showed up from all around the country, didn't know anything about land rights.

And that actually wasn't what got them to go to Bunkerville, Nevada. It was Cliven's story that there were all these snipers lined up around his home pointing guns at his kids' heads. It wasn't true, but it was enough to get to. the militias into their cars and on the road because it sounded like Ruby Ridge standoff in Idaho where a sniper had killed a woman who was standing in a doorway with her baby in her arms. That was just pre-McVeigh, right? It was one of the things that got McVeigh to move. You know, the two standoffs that really get this group going are Ruby Ridge and Waco.

They have taken on mythic proportions in the anti-government extremist movement. They don't really know, they don't specifically know what happened because a lot of these guys are and it was before their time. They just know that government killed people, that they were militarized, and that they were the final straw. So that's what made Cliven's story so plausible? That's what made it plausible.

That and the government made a huge mistake. They set up what they called First Amendment areas where protesters could get inside this little pen and exercise their First Amendment rights. That's bad. It may be legal in terms of Supreme Court ruling and all that, but it's very bad optics. And when you have a group that considers themselves constitutionalists,

that was just waving a red flag in front of a great big bowl. And it didn't take long. I mean, you had several hundred people that immediately got there. I mean, they were from local states, but you had people that were driving all the way from New Hampshire or Tennessee or Florida with their guns in the back of their cars ready to shoot federal agents. And so when the confrontation finally happened on April 12th, You had several hundred people in a wash facing about three dozen feds who were mostly carrying less than lethal firearms.

And had a shot been fired, had a car backfired, it would have been a bloodbath. So how was it finally resolved? The feds backed down. The feds said, okay, we're outnumbered. We've got women and children and horses and dogs right in front of us so we can't use tear gas. They simply backed away from it and left the scene. It was seen as an enormous victory in the movement and became a huge recruiting tool. We stood up to the feds.

The feds backed down. We won. We were on our way. And that was the right thing to do. The feds were outnumbered and it wasn't appropriate to have a blood bath over a bunch of cattle. The problem is they then took two years to prosecute. And in that two year period, the movement got extremely arrogant. They won.

You know, in the eyes of everyone when no one got arrested for a point. pointing guns at feds, you won. You did win. That's how the Malier Refuge takeover came about is they won the first time they were going to try again. And that was earlier this year, you know, Oregon, right? Yeah, there were two smaller standoffs in the middle, two miners, one in Oregon and one in Montana, the sugar pine mine and the White Hope mine. They didn't have much happen simply because the feds didn't show up for the standoff. So they were effectively able to keep federal agents away from doing their jobs. Each time you have a little minor victory like that, it adds up. And I can't imagine too many other crimes where something that big would happen,

where they wouldn't be, there wouldn't be an attempt to arrest them. Why do you think that the law enforcement hasn't been pushing this as hard? Why haven't there been mass arrests, etc? Because does it just feed into their myth? It feeds into their myth. I mean, even now that there have been arrests. In Bunkerville, you only had 19 arrests out of the hundreds that showed up with firearms. Why? There's an entire group called the Oathkeepers. They haven't arrested at all. And they were there with guns ready to kill federal agents. In Oregon, at least you had 26 arrests out of the, say, four dozen people. So that's actually better. But why aren't the arrests complete? Why aren't you arresting everyone that participated in an armed standoff? I don't have an answer to why.

I think I don't know if it's political will that says, okay, we're done. Let's not make any more waves. I just don't know. It's been a problem for as long as I've been monitoring the movement, which is about almost 20 years. There's been, for example, there have been no hearings on this movement in that time. And yet the movement is large. The movement is engaged in some pretty significant violent plots. It just seems that nobody cares. Do they vote? Yes, they vote. For a while, while there they didn't because they were too paranoid to give up their Social Security number to register to vote. But especially in this current election cycle, they've become extremely active. They were originally backing Ben Carson as their hero, which is kind of interesting, considering a lot of people still call them a white supremacist movement. Then they moved on to Perry and now they're in very heavily behind Trump. Is there perhaps part of the government that sees these people as voters? And I mean, is there a some element, you say that they're electing sheriffs. I mean, it sounds very interesting in that

they are part of the political process. I mean, they're not just separate from it. I don't think that's the reason. I think that they are voting in sheriffs only in rural locations. And sheriffs tap into something that rural anger. But I don't think it's because they're a voting pool. In 2009, it was kind of a pivotal event. Homeland Security came out with a report about right-wing extremism and about this movement in particular. and it made some predictions. And it was a very interesting report, and it turns out all those predictions were true.

The problem is it was leaked to the press, and the press, some of the conservative press, made a circus out of it. And instead of simply, you know, saying, well, you know, standing by their report, they ended up dissolving that part of the Homeland Security that actually tracks this movement. And since that time, no one really has.

It's only very, very recently that there have been any kind of reports coming out of Homeland Security on, for example, the militia movement or the sovereign citizen movement, there were several years in there where no one monitored them at all. You know, you consider the resources put into Islamic terrorism in the United States versus every other type of terrorism. It's pretty shocking. Another movement that seems perhaps tied to this called the American Readout.

I know they're survivalists are part of it. It's creating almost a geographic. graphical area inside the United States, that's a safe space for some of these ideas? Sure. That's happened over and over and over again throughout the history of the movement. There have always been attempts to carve out their own country. It was kind of done in a different way in California, in the 70s. It was, you know, the state of Jefferson is northern California, southern Oregon. The redoubt is simply parts of Idaho, Montana, and eastern Oregon, and eastern Washington. The Free State Project in New Hampshire was a similar attempt, although they were trying

to work within the system to do it, simply have enough people move to a geographic area to control the vote. There have been attempts to do this over and over again. It never really takes. They might get a few hundred members, maybe in a couple of cases, a thousand. I think the Free State project was the most successful because they had 20,000 people pledge, but only a few hundred people actually joined, actually moved to New Hampshire. But anyway, the attempt to set up your own nation has gone on for 40, 50 years. So we've talked a bit about the movement from the right. Is there a left side of this as well? There is. You have an entire group called Morish Sovereigns that tend to be left-wing. They're all African-American with one exception, someone who called himself

a Morish sovereign than I just thought, I didn't understand what that meant. Some of the younger people, joining the movement, the 18 to 28 crowd, tend to come in from the left wing. Some of them are occupied, many of them are anonymous. I think there's an assumption that for disenfranchised people, they have more in common with each other than they do with mainstream politics. There's an attempt to label this entire movement as right wing, and that's not accurate, because there is a strong left wing element and there's an anarchist element. And, you know, if you look at the traditional idea of politics as a straight line right on one side, left on the other, that doesn't really make sense. Some people have painted politics as a

horseshoe or the fringe on either end have more in common than they do with the mainstream. I think that's true. And I think in some cases, you're going to have the fringe joining forces. There were, for example, militia at Ferguson. There were new Black Panthers at Bundy Ranch. It's going to be interesting because I think the left-wing side of the movement is going to grow pretty quickly. And there comes a point where left and right wing are no longer really applicable here, because these people are out in the fringe. So when we say left wing, do you mean anti-corporation, anti-surveillance, what kind of motivations? Anti-corporation, anti-sverance, anti-cops. One of the things they share, for example, is in 2014, you saw it at Wendy Ranch and you saw it at Ferguson,

this whole notion of the demilitarization of police, that you need to strip away. police having bearcats and having protective gear and having weapons and having things that they get from the federal government. And it was really interesting to see because both left and right were having the same argument about militarization of police. In this movement, I think it's for different reasons. I think in the left wing part of the movement, it's because they feel intimidated by it. And on the right wing side, I think they're anti-militarization because it makes it harder to kill police. But regardless, you have kind of an interesting shift where you have two sides sharing the same goal, which is to strip those things from policemen. Two of the gentlemen that were

arrested at Ferguson for plotting to blow up the police department were both new Black Panthers, and then one of them was a sovereign citizen. And so the traditional left-wing, right-lingling labels don't really matter anymore. Which section of these groups kind of scares you the most, JJ? Which one keeps you up at night? I have to say I'm not worried about them forming an army. I'm not worried. That's their goal is to form a continental army to tear down the U.S. government in a way that duplicates what happened during the American Revolution. That's what their stated goal is.

I am not worried about that at all. There's so much infighting. There's so many egos. There's so much competition for leadership and kind of bidding about who can be the most verbose online. I'm not worried about that at all. What I am worried about are small cells of, for example, militia, who decide enough talking online it's time to do. And the problem is, and they know this problem, that when you have five people get together and decide, okay, we're going to tear down a building, we're going to blow up something, we're going to kill a bunch of people. Bob's are pretty good that one of them is an FBI agent.

And so they're very, very paranoid about anything larger than three or four people. But what keeps me up at night are the would-be McVeys. There's so many failed attempts to bomb a federal building or to kidnap and kill judges or the biggest thing right now is police officers. There's so many failed attempts to destroy infrastructure and things like that that eventually some of them are going to get through. Some of them are actually going to happen. I'm very worried about whatever the next McVeigh may bring.

Well, JJ, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much. It's time. Thanks for listening to this week's show. If you enjoyed it, tell people by rating us on iTunes. We'd love to hear from you. Our Twitter handle is at War underscore College. Show ideas and criticism are both welcome.

War College was created by me, Jason Fields, and Craig Headach. Matthew Galt co-hosts the show and grabs the guests. Our producer this week, as most weeks, is Bethel HopTech.