Chapter 1: Secret Militia

A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN MILITIA MOVEMENT:

America’s Shooting Edge

By Nita M. Renfrew©2000

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

                                               Thomas Jefferson

PART I:  Broken Seal

Chapter 1

SECRET MILITIA

I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.

                                                                      Nathan Hale

I knew already there was something mean amiss in America when a federal building was bombed in 1995, and soon after, news of Militias training for battle, quoting Thomas Jefferson, became commonplace. Until that time, I had investigated conflicts between peoples and governments far away, mainly in the Middle East and Central America. Now, sensing that the important story was moving to my own homeground, I turned my sights accordingly. What I found out about the Oklahoma bombing did not really surprise me.

What I found out about the Militias, however, would change my life forever.

It was in the spring of 1996 that I had my first Militia interview, with the bearded commander of an underground citizen Militia, at a remote place in the countryside. I shall call him Tom Church to protect his identity. We rendezvoused early one morning at a place in the state of New York which I cannot disclose. When I arrived, he was waiting for me, standing next to his van on a dirt road a few hundred feet from the highway. Tall and slender, in his late forties, he wore slacks and a t-shirt, not fatigues. His eyes were brown and gentle, his hands sensitive, with long fingers, and there was a fluid, transparent quality to him. Without the slightest affectation, and with a clear sense of purpose, almost as if he were a concerned parent reporting that he was a member of the local PTA, Tom said simply, "U.S. Militia, New York Regiment."

In the three years since the federal government's gun-control raid in Waco, Texas, on a church, as many Americans saw it -- gassing then burning eighty-some children, women and men -- outraged citizens had been enrolling spontaneously in Militia of their own creation in most every corner of the American Union. Aside from the horror of it all, rural America saw the raid and ensuing massacre as a Second Amendment matter. The feds had had no business being at the church commune at Waco, since there had been no unlawful firearms activity. The feds had had no business being there anyway, since the Constitution made no provision for federal police powers.

Indeed, it was the second time in the short history of the United States that citizen Militias had sprung up en masse spontaneously. The first had been two centuries earlier, after Lexington and Concord, outside Boston, where, also in a weapons raid, and also at a church, one of the king's men had fired "the shot that rang out around the world." In 1775, the local pastor and his flock had been defending their Militia arsenal from the Redcoats on the village green in front of their church when they took eight fatal casualties. Immediately, with most patriots already enrolled at that time in some form of citizen Militia, they had begun furiously to prepare, from one end of the Colonies to the other, to fight for independence.

The day that Lexington happened was April 19—long known as "Patriots Day" to commemorate the start of America's Revolutionary War. It was also known as "John Parker Day," after the local minutemen commander, who had said presciently before the shooting began, "Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon; but if they mean to have a way, let it begin here."

Two centuries later, the government's heinous deed at Waco, curiously, would take place on that same day, April 19, in the spring of 1993. It was not lost on 20th-century patriots that, as at Lexington earlier, government troops at Waco also fired on members of a local church and their pastor, also with the intention of disarming them and confiscating their lawful weapons. And so, in the nineties, well-aware of Lexington's place in the nation's short history—even sometimes to the point almost of confusing the two incidents—mostly-rural Americans went about furiously enrolling for a second time in the Militia.

 From the start of today's Militia movement, the historic date that marked the start of the Revolutionary War, April 19, had been manipulated by shadowy forces to no good end. But, the movement, as I was fast learning, had quickly managed nevertheless to rise above it all -- something that had gone unreported in the mainstream media -- in its best moments achieving an authentic, noble, grassroots expression of the people nationwide. It was as though the Revolutionary War and everything it had come to stand for, as embodied in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights -- like scripture—was in the end so sacred that anything to do with it was destined to a certain purity of spirit that could not be sullied, despite the many efforts to do so.

At the time of Waco in early 1993, throughout the nation, tensions ran high, with jobs being downsized out of existence or moved overseas in deference to the recently-declared "New World Order"—later changed to "global economy," or "globalization." Myself a Democrat at the time, I was horrified by what I saw at Waco, watching with the entire nation a Democratic administration slaughter people—many of them, such as the children, plainly innocent. (It was worse for me than if it had been Republicans, the so-called party of big business, as had been the case during the Persian Gulf War, when I had agonized over the killing of a half million-plus Iraqi civilians.) As if the slaughter of innocents weren't bad enough, my fellow Democrats had remained silent simply because it was a Democratic president, when in my mind, we were supposed to be the party against government abuses—the party of Thomas Jefferson, for individual rights and justice. The Democrats, I had thought, if anything, should be held to higher standards than others. 

That was what I had been taught by my parents in the '50s when I was growing up. But clearly it was no longer the same party. When I thought about it, I realized that this was because slowly during the '60s and '70s it had become the party of special-interest, group-rights and collective solutions. No longer the defender of individual rights, that were what had made Americans different from other nations, that had been emphasized in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. In the aftermath of Waco, it was as if the shades fell from my eyes as I began painfully to realize that fellow Democrats had only beat the drums of Watergate and Iran-Contra because they were crimes of Republicans, not out of some basic principle of decency, or rights, or justice. And there was no getting around the fact that Democrats had looked the other way during Waco simply because those under siege happened to be of a different political persuasion. Something had gone terribly wrong in the nation, and although I did not see it then the way "patriots" did, the immorality of it all, at the time, I found it no different from how the Nazis had started. I had immediately thought, "If they can do it to them, they can do it to me -- us."

In my search to try to understand how this could be in the United States of America, at first, I never imagined that my quest, in the last years of the millenium, would consume me. Slowly, though, I would come to understand—albeit with great difficulty—that Waco, whatever else it might have been, was the embodiment and result of a gun control policy that had started during the Depression, now tightening its vise, not on criminals, but on the general, law-abiding population—in full breach of the Bill of Rights—difficult as it was for many Americans to understand, and that if the Second Amendment did not survive, neither would our other rights. What we were living was the sundering of the very foundations of the nation—one paid for in full in the 18th century with the blood of Americans yearning to be free of a European order that had its roots in feudalism, where land often was not privately owned and there was little freedom for ordinary people (especially when there was peace—in wartime, ironically, there was often greater freedom in the chaos), and government police power was highly centralized. It was an order that at the time had sat badly in this vast new world, and it continued to do so.

For this was how it all looked to the newly-pledged Militiamen and women I encountered in my quest, who believed they could change things back to the way it was meant to be in the Constitution—through a purely educational process. In the beginning, so certain were these patriots that all that was needed to awaken their fellow Americans was to teach them their history and their rights, that many Militias were highly visible and held public meetings, going so far as to advertise in the local papers. For them, it seemed only natural to use the tools that were the legacy of the Founding Fathers—the First and Second Amendments in the Bill of Rights: the rights to freedom of expression and assembly, and to keep and bear arms, for all to see, as a reminder of who held the power under the Constitution. These early Militia people fully expected that, combined with the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances," which came at the end of the First Amendment, this would enable them peaceably to turn the government around. And so it was that in the mid-1990s a flurry of angry petitions reminiscent of those that preceded the Revolutionary War went out from patriots and the Militias to the Congress.

Others of the Militias, however, though they were visible, already had begun to hold meetings by invitation only. Still others, as if cognizant of the far-harder times to come, were entirely secret from the start, or had quickly become secret. These invisible, underground Militias planned to make themselves known only when the time came for open war—if, indeed, it came to that, only after all other means were exhausted, as they said—against the new government tyranny. Such was the U.S. Militia, that reached across the nation from coast to shining coast, of which Tom Church was New York commander.

It was a chilly day, and Tom invited me into the front seat of his van. We sat looking out past a shed, over a wide-open field about to turn green, and it struck me that the earth was impatient after a long winter's wait. Tom told me he had never been interviewed in his capacity as a U.S. Militia commander. Nor had any other member of the U.S. Militia. He talked to me for four hours.

The first thing he did was recite for me the current federal law on the Militia -- Title 10 United States Code, Section 311 -- which every Militiaman knew by heart:

(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 13 of Title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States...

(b) The classes of the militia are: 1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and 2) the unorganized militia, which consists of members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.

In plain language, what this meant was that in the United States every able-bodied male between the ages of seventeen and forty-five who was not a member of the regular armed forces, was by federal law a member of the "unorganized" Militia, subject to call-up. Under the Constitution, in Article II, Section 2, the president was "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual service of the United States." Otherwise, the body of the Militia remained at large, autonomous, merely a potential fighting force that was nevertheless a living symbol of liberty and a check on government, as meant by the Founders.

State constitutions being more inclusive, most everybody not enrolled in the government armed forces was by law and by right a member of the state Militia at the place of residence. Tom pointed out to me that I also was a member of the New York Militia, albeit a non-enrolled member. Article XII of the New York constitution stated:

[Defense; militia,] The defense and protection of the state and of the United States is an obligation of all persons within the state.

The question of what the Militia was, and the distinctions within it, I was fast learning, had been blurred in the public perception during the years since the late 18th century, when the intention had been to form a citizen Militia along the lines of Switzerland—invincible to the outside world, a bulwark against tyranny. The Founding Fathers had meant for there never again to be a standing army on American soil, and accordingly, it had been made a requirement that any army that came into being, and any funding for it, be reauthorized every two years by Congress. Today this was done routinely, as a matter of course, as if it were the normal thing to have a paid, standing army in the land of John Adams, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

The Militia Act of 1792, immediately following the 1791 drafting of the first ten Articles of Amendment, better known as the Bill of Rights, had called for every able-bodied white male citizen between the ages of seventeen and forty-five to enroll in the Militia within six months and obtain a musket, bayonet and 24 rounds of ammunition. This had been federal law until (shortly before) 1903, when the Efficiency of the Militia Act had been passed, known as the Dick Act. It was this piece of legislation that had become the basis for a permanent standing army, appropriate to war overseas, interestingly, as the Militias liked to point out, just as World War I was approaching in Europe. There would, in the months and indeed years to come, be so many connections and information that I hadn't previously thought of, or known, that the Militias alerted me to in making their case that there was tyranny, that often I would find myself numbed by information overload. 

Tom, after citing the federal law on the Militia, proceeded to quote the Second Article of Amendment—better known simply as the Second Amendment—in the Bill of Rights, the bedrock on which the "unorganized" Militias rested their existence: 

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

There had come about a great deal of controversy over what these words were really intended to mean. Gun control advocates today argued that the first half of the sentence—"A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State"—was the "preamble," and therefore the dominant clause. They said this meant that the second part, having to do with "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms," did not mean an individual right at all, but fell, rather, within the context of the collective, states' right to Militia—characterized as the National Guard.

Rereading my American history, however, I found that James Madison, in an early draft, had placed the part about the "right of the people," now in the so-called preamble, before the right to "Militia" (something that gun controllers conveniently failed to mention), thereby invalidating the gun controllers' own argument. The original draft, that came to be the Second Amendment, had said:

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, a well-armed and well-regulated militia being the best security of a free country;

 Madison had never intended to suppress the individual right. There was a great deal more evidence that, from the beginning, the founders had meant to affirm the individual as well as the collective right to "keep and bear arms." In fact, the Founding Fathers had all believed without question that the individual right "to keep and bear arms" was God-given, or "natural," as indeed they believed all rights were. In the opening paragraph, the Declaration of Independence made reference to the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," with the statement: 

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitles them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation. 

Staunch believers in "natural rights," it was important to bear in mind, had included the Antifederalists and Federalists alike -- both Founding factions -- including those Federalists who would later argue against a Bill of Rights on the grounds that the body of the Constitution was sufficient in and of itself. The Federalists (who favored a strong central government) argued, among other things, that since the people would always be armed, they would outnumber any army the government might have in the future, making tyranny impossible. (And if today's patriots and Militias were right, indeed, these Federalists had been proven wrong.)

I had always taken rights for granted, and it had never occurred to me to ask whence they came, or how rights were defined as such. But the Founding Fathers, it was clear, had had to ask these questions frequently as they framed the original documents. Rights, they said, were "natural" and antecedent to the Declaration of Independence, and they came from God or "the Creator"; the Constitution and Bill of Rights were meant, not as a granting agent but simply as an affirmation of the God-given, "natural" rights that already existed. Freedom of speech, of religion, the right to assembly, and to keep and bear arms, were all considered "natural" rights.

Early Americans, I learned, believed furthermore that the Second Amendment was the basis for all our freedoms and rights, stemming as it did from the very basic "right of self-defense," be it from a common criminal or a foreign invasion, or even from the government itself. The "right to keep and bear arms" could be traced in documented form back to seventh-century England at the time of the Saxon government, but it had existed, unwritten, long before among the Celts. This right had preceded by several centuries any recognized right to freedom of speech and assembly, and religion. Without the right to keep and bear arms spelled out in a Bill of Rights, many of the Founding Fathers had believed there could be no guarantee of any other right. On this, Samuel Adams, a founder of the Sons of Liberty in Boston, at the fore of the fight for independence, had written:

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.

In the eighteenth century in the Colonies, the English philosopher John Locke was widely read, and it was he who best articulated this right to self-defense, taking it even farther, to include the "right to rebellion." Locke believed there was a natural morality in pre-social man, and that the best way to secure its benefits was by contracting into civil society, surrendering some personal power to magistrates and a ruler. But if the ruling body offended against this "natural law," the population retained the right to depose it. In 1776, it was thoughts of this right to rebellion that suffused Thomas Jefferson when he wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government... 

Jefferson and Samuel Adams (along with his cousin John Adams, the second president) had differed on the matter of the right to property. John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Natural Government, had talked about the natural right to "life, liberty and property." Jefferson, however, had substituted for property, "the pursuit of happiness," for he believed property was a "civil" not a "natural" right, with the matter of slavery close at hand. But many in the property rights groups today subscribed to the natural-right-to-property tradition, and interpreted the pursuit of happiness as being that right. Land ownership, I was fast learning, along with the Second Amendment, was one of the main issues of contention in today's nascent rebellion. It was for this reason that, so long as there remained a belief in private land ownership, the citizen Militias would not easily go away. 

My growing understanding of the concept of the right to rebellion, through my interviews with the Militias and their associates, and that it was the bedrock upon which my country was founded, was also bringing me to the realization that if, as a country, we continued along the present road, at the end there could be only armed confrontation. If you will, a second Revolutionary War, which many patriots already foresaw. An unarmed citizenry in the United States of America, as I was fast learning, in the eyes of the Founding Fathers would have been a contradiction in terms.

The question now was: Who were these Militiamen, preparing to take on the government by force of arms?

One of the first questions I asked Tom Church was why he had agreed to the interview with me when the U.S. Militia was a secret organization. His answer was, "I feel that I may be called upon soon to give my life for my country, and I want the historical record preserved." Also, he added, unlike some of his associates, he recognized that when the time came, they would need public support, and for that, the Militias would need media coverage.

The son of a decorated World War II veteran who had commanded a heavy-artillery battery at Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, Tom told me he had been born in 1949 (this made him 46 or 47), growing up in upstate New York with a drawerful of his father's medals and decorations. In his youth he had been an athlete -- a football tackle and end, and a wrestler. He was also an award-winning classical musician; he played the cello, as well as the piano and the drums. Tom told me proudly that he had been "first chair" in the All-State Symphony. But he had had to abandon all hope of continuing on this path professionally when there was no money for college.

From a young age, Tom explained to me, his parents had exposed him to patriot-type Americans who were concerned about the U.S. going into the United Nations. "I have a perspective of thirty-five years of watching this thing develop, this New World Order. People were telling us thirty, thirty-five years ago that these things would come to pass. They were like a voice crying in the wilderness. I can see they were prophetic. I haven't seen them wrong on a single point. They knew the UN would become a vehicle, if not exactly, where one-world government would reside, that we would move into a cashless society, which we are doing right now. Squandering our resources and young people on foreign wars that have little to do with our Constitutional principles."

Tom had been far ahead even of many of his fellow patriots, for whom the subject of the New World Order had become a matter of concern only after President George Bush's speech at the United Nations. There, in the fall of 1990, Bush had gone about setting the stage for the Persian Gulf War under the rubric of "a New World Order"—a shocking term for those who had lived through World War II and Hitler's proclaiming of "Die Neue Ordnung" ("the New Order"). As it had turned out, Bush's talk about the New World Order had been the prelude to arriving at what was now being referred to inside the UN itself, no longer simply as the "United Nations," but rather, as the "United Nations System." This new UN, it was becoming evident, was to be empowered globally by a permanent peacemaking, peacekeeping force—be it official UN or loosely-affiliated NATO forces—which the UN attack on Iraq had been meant to establish. As events unfolded, it was becoming apparent that the UN's Peace Force (and soon NATO) was merely a euphemism for a supranational standing army with police powers, beholden to no electorate. It had not been long before the budget for the peacekeeping forces exceeded the entire rest of the UN budget, by 1994 absorbing a full two thirds of it.

The "UN System," it was not hard to figure out, simply meant the increasingly powerful combination, mainly of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva, enforcing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington—later would come the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) (defeated, for the time being, in '98) and a slew of other new UN control agencies, such as the UN world court in Rome (with no jury trial or right to habeas corpus and other such guarantees), and the equivalent of a world central bank (proposed in 1998 by the same global robber barons that had just finished plundering a number of the world's economies, so they would have full control over what was left). The forces behind these organizations were working together to engineer a global economic society, with the capability to enforce decisions, to be followed eventually, of course, by a global political society governed by one body. (A major think-tank economist I knew explained to me at the time that economists had realized that what had gone wrong in the former Soviet Union was that the political system had been changed prior to changing over the economic system. Having made that mistake in Russia, obviously, these players were not about to make it again in the global theater.)

A civilian UN staff member with the Peace Force, talking to me off the record that year, acknowledged that -- contrary to what the UN was saying publicly -- there were discussions underway where it was clearly being planned that the UN would be the seat of one-world government. He explained it thus: "It will be composed of committees in different parts of the world, so that decision-making is decentralized. The decisions will be enforced by the peacekeeping forces. I agree that it will be terrible, but there's no other way—with the overpopulation in the world and the dangers to the environment. China will accept it because they will have representatives on the committees." ("Overpopulation," as I was yet to learn, was the important code word here, and "decentralized" meant, decentralized only so far as the general populations were concerned.)

Militiamen and women believed that this was too much power for one "government" body. The way they saw it, today it was an American president making the big decisions, what to do with this military might—even though he did so at the behest, not of the American people, but of the same big business and banking interests that were directing and staffing the UN System's regulatory, trade and financial organs. But who would make the decisions tomorrow, when there were to be no more national armies, and individuals had all been disarmed? For this was the ultimate, shocking goal of the UN disarmament program, which the U.S., as was pointed out to me over and over by Militiamen, had officially subscribed to in the early '60s with President John F. Kennedy's three-stage Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World. JFK had presented it to the UN, and shortly afterwards, it had been passed into U.S. law. Still, in the spring of '96, I had yet to read this "Program" or the U.S. law, and I remained skeptical of the many points being made by the Militias regarding the UN and its intended use.

"Korea was the first UN war," Tom explained. "It still hasn't been taken care of. The story I was told then was that the UN doesn't want wars to be ended, just stopped, so we have foreign war zones around the world, and that eventually foreign troops would come in here and begin to police us. It is almost here. The average person working doesn't have time to consume reports thousands of pages long. A lot of people fault the American people, but I don't. You have to give credit to every working person, working long and hard. It is masterful. The media have hidden the truth. So it is not easy to see these things. But it was possible for me, so it is possible for more people to do what I did. My neighbors, however, weren't at all interested. I can't understand. Lots of people today say they know what I'm talking about, but they don't want to hear. They don't know what they can do. It turns out, they have to keep their jobs like, with the municipal government or whatever. They are like a whipped puppy dog. There is a lot of pressure in the United States on political dissidents.

"There were guest speakers in Syracuse at the American Opinion Library, a bookstore—some of them war refugees from Eastern-Bloc, Communist countries. I heard people talk who had had to walk for miles and miles, eating rodents and frogs, to escape to the West. I met some of them. That left an impression. I understood the value of liberty."

Tom said he figured that if he pursued his music studies, he would end up being a public school teacher, which he didn't want to do. And so, since there was no money for college anyway, and there was a war and a draft on, Tom and his father decided that he should sign up with the National Guard. "My father was aghast at what he saw in Korea," Tom said. "He got first-hand stories of how we were being held back, and the UN was instrumental in passing information to the Koreans through the Russians. There is always a Russian or Soviet Bloc commander of the UN military section at the UN, by agreement. When my father saw the Viet Nam war, he stated that it was not a war to protect this country, that it was a war to involve us. It was a UN war, through SEATO. Americans don't understand this." (The South-East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), indeed, like NATO, in its charter was bound to UN principles.)

"My father did not want me to go into active service and squander my life on Viet Nam. Yet, I was a patriot. I couldn't see myself being a coward. He understood that, and looked around and found a unit of the New York Air National Guard. In 1966, my junior year, I took the test and passed, and was on the waiting list. It was a vehicle for people who didn't want to go to Viet Nam. Within six days of graduation I was in basic training at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas. My duty station was New York. I was a technician, flight line equipment. There was the Pueblo incident, and many National Guard units were activated. Mine was not. I never feared going to Viet Nam, though, and would have gone if called. If I went, I was sure I would return. I fulfilled my six-year term, and reenlisted for an additional term, and received an honorable discharge."

A voracious reader from the time he was ten and eleven, Tom said he had begun spending his study periods in the library, reading the New York Times and local papers cover to cover, as well as history books. He also listened to radio and network news, and quickly found that not everything in the news accounts was the truth. "Today you see events unfold, and two days later, accounts in the paper scarcely resemble what you saw," he explained. He began to wonder if what they read in the history books was accurate, and this led him to "look into the layers beneath the facade."

One subject that Tom said he had looked into when he was still in school, surprised at first me since he was a Northerner, though I was soon to find that it was pertinent to the entire Militia movement. He had attended a "Union free school," he explained, "where we're told the War Between the States was to abolish slavery" (he used the Southerner name for the Civil War). "But slavery only came into the picture halfway through the war. I believe it was over control of resources and manpower. The bankers had a role in it. The war was over issues of states' rights. Even though we are told that slavery was abolished, I believe that one form of slavery was abolished and another instituted. After the War the blacks still lived on the same piece of land they had before, picking cotton. The owners of the property extracted a share of the crops so that the family was left with little to exist on. Today, we blacks and whites are having the same type of thing forced upon us. The government gets bigger, and needs more of our substance."

I was to learn in the coming months that many "patriots" and Militia members considered the "War Between the States," as they often referred to it, a major turning point in the consolidation of power into one centralized government, to make it easier for the big banks and big business in the North (now become the Eastern Establishment) to exert power over all Americans. One, the North had wanted control of the cotton exchange. First, they had instituted high tariffs to force the South to use the proceeds from sales of cotton in Europe to purchase goods made in the Northern factories. But when Southerners reduced their imports, Europe had retaliated, reducing purchases of the South's cotton. Big business and the banks, ever since, had gone back and forth between supporting protection and supporting free trade, depending on which of the two best served their interests of the moment. At that time it was protection; now that companies were "global," it was open borders, with managed trade -- the so-called "free trade."

The Justice Department—responsible for so many injustices today in the eyes of many—I learned, had been created during Reconstruction following the war, when the South was under military occupation, and it was this that had first made it possible to have a federal police force, leading eventually to the creation of the IRS, DEA, FBI, ATF and all the other federal police agencies still coming into existence. The Founding Fathers had meant to guard against this by keeping police powers within each individual state. Too much power in the federal government, they had believed, would corrupt it. In the same vein, today's patriots generally believed the country was too big and too diverse to be governed by one set of laws and one police. As they saw it, without a strong federal government, there would still be corruption and abuse of power in the smaller, localized and state governments, but not all under the control of one group. You could still, up and leave a place. But with only one, overarching world administration (government), in the future, no more would there be there any place to go.

The all-pervasive, still-growing federal power in the U.S., patriots believed, had furthermore become as corrupt as any local goverment ever was. (For example, as I read in a New York Times article, it was revealed in the secret documents of the tobacco companies that in the early '70s, when the matter of the warning label on cigarettes had come up, it had been clearly stated that they were certain to get a better deal from the U.S. Congress than from the numerous state legislatures, since they could "control Congress." Indeed, it was the individual states, not the federal government, in the late '90s, that exposed the big tobacco companies' practice of using additives such as ammonia to make cigarettes more addictive, and of targeting children with their ads.)  

With Tom Church, I was being given one of my first glimpses into the "patriot mythology" -- that complex body of beliefs and information shared by the Militias and the various other "patriot" movements, on subjects—in addition to the United Nations, the New World Order, the Civil War and land ownership—as diverse as: the Federal Reserve System, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), and the important relationship between these three Treasury Department creatures (all of which, the Militias pointed out, had come into being directly or indirectly as a result of World War I); along with Social Security and individual sovereignty and citizenship; driver's licenses; and indeed, the entire judicial system.

They called themselves patriots, as I was learning, because they harked back to the beliefs and principles of the eighteenth-century American Revolutionaries who had thrown off British rule when taxes became oppressive, the legal system arbitrary and, most important, the Redcoats attempted to confiscate the Militias' weapons. The parallels with today's state of affairs could not be more obvious.

At the start of the Revolutionary War, the Militias were quick to point out, only some three to six percent of Colonists supported independence, and at the height of the war, this support was never greater than 30%; the remaining 60% were evenly divided between pro-British and neutrals. Clearly, if it had not been for the insistence on their "natural rights" by a handful of Colonial leaders backed by the Militias (preceding the Continental Army), Americans would have remained subjects beholden to the British crown—not citizens.

Within the larger patriot community, today's Militias, by and large, were considered to be the armed branch of the patriot movement. The Militias' early members, more often than not, already subscribed to patriot causes, seeing themselves as tax protesters, Common Law advocates, sovereign citizen and jury and land rights activists, and a wide variety of Constitutionalists. Some of them were religious "fundamentalists" and "religionists," of the sort found in religious Jewish and Moslem communities that believed in a system of law based on religious scripture, in this case a Protestant Christian government. Most patriots, however, were not any one thing. But in their search for solutions to the growing sense of alienation from the government that they shared with many Americans, they had taken bits and pieces from here and there. And so, today's patriots were was as disparate a movement as the eighteenth-century American Revolutionaries, ironically, playing out many of the same differences. Because the early history and founding documents of the nation had been required reading in the patriot movement already in the '80s, it was not surprising that the next step in the '90s was: arms and the Militias.

Thus, in '93, '94, there developed out of the patriot movement a full-fledged "citizen Militia movement" in its own right, with its own distinctive characteristics and differences of opinion. There was today a core, mainstream "Constitutional Citizens Militia Movement," with a common purpose that rested firmly on the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Militiamen believed the Constitution was being violated; indeed, many pointed to compelling evidence that the Constitution had been suspended altogether, without the knowledge of the general public. (This, I would learn, was not as farfetched as it sounded at first.) The stated, universal aim of this mainstream Militia was to defend against tyranny and restore the Constitution and Bill of Rights to their rightful place as checks and balances. Checks and balances on a government "by the People." Their principle means of so doing, the Constitutional Militias saw as being the exercising of their First and Second Amendments—freedom of speech and assembly, and to petition the government for redress of grievances, and backing this up, the right to bear arms and form Militia.

A deterrent to war.

When the patriots and Militias spoke of the Constitution, they generally understood it to include the Bill of Rights as the last word. As was pointed out to me by one Militia member, in the "Preamble" to the Bill of Rights itself, it said the "further declaratory and restrictive clauses" had been "added" to the Constitution expressly "to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers." (This, of course, meant that, should there be any difference of interpretation, the Bill of Rights ruled.)

Not to be confused with the Republican Party's so-called "conservatives" among the Washington elite—or with other, separatist and paramilitary groups that called themselves patriots and "militias" (such as the neo-Nazi and white supremacist armed groups like the Aryan Nations)— most Militia members considered themselves "conservatives" simply because they adhered to the country's traditional values, as espoused by the likes of: Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, George Mason, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson—all, Founding Fathers and Antifederalists. It was not surprising that the patriots and Militias gravitated to the Antifederalists, who had fought for the addition of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution when those of a Federalist persuasion (such as, especially, Alexander Hamilton, but also John Adams, and even James Madison, who, ironically, was Jefferson's protegé— Jefferson was in Paris) had argued that a Bill of Rights was unnecessary. George Washington had been more a soldier than a thinker. (In a sense, however, he had also been a Federalist, assuming many of the monarchical trappings of government that Hamilton and Adams urged on him. But he had also made that grandest of "republican" gestures by stepping down from office, leaving his place in history unassailable.) 

In modern times, "federalism" was often used to mean a decentralized system of government, but in the 18th century it had been the other way around, with the Federalists favoring a strong centralized government, and the Antifederalists a weak federal government and strong states. In the 18th century, the principles of freedom, as embodied in the founding documents, had been radical and progressive, and still were today, judging by the efforts to vitiate them. It was undeniable to anyone who read their writings, that most of the Founders we consider great today fought for and envisioned a true separation of power in government, and an absolute regard for the Bill of Rights. Although today it had become fashionable in what passed for American mainstream culture, to justify breaching (though they didn't call it that) the Bill of Rights, along with the main body of the Constitution, while saying that times were different, the Militias, like the Founders, professed the Bill of Rights to be inviolable—or as Thomas Jefferson would have said, "inalienable." These principles of individual rights and liberties, while still "radical" today (in the sense of "going to the root"), with the passing of time, had also become "traditional" (in the sense of conserving past traditions), and, went the argument, were therefore "conservative" in the truest sense of the word.

Patriots considered themselves also populists and antiglobalists— to further differentiate themselves from the capital's elitist, "internationalist" conservatives (whom they saw simply as pro-big business, and its derivative, the global economy—not real conservatives at all). Although the Newt Gingriches might say many of the right things, they could never be "conservative" in the true American tradition so long as they embraced gun control and globalism. (Indeed, in the '98 elections, Gingrich and his policies would be overwhelmingly rejected by a multitude of the nation's true conservative voters.) Ronald Reagan had made many of the right noises, but as one disillusioned Militiaman who voted for him pointed out to me, it was under his presidency that many of the screws were tightened. Reagan's name, I found, though many of them clearly loved him, rarely came up at all among the Militias.

Tom continued, "The Declaration of Independence spoke of hordes of British officers being sent out, eating of the substance of the people."

It was the second time that Tom had referred to the "substance" of the people when referring to present-day conditions, paraphrasing the language in the Declaration of Independence, which, I was finding, was something the Militias did often. Thomas Jefferson had put it thus:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

"Taxation," said Tom, "at the point when 50% accrues in taxes, you are no longer the majority stock holder, and you are an indentured servant, or a slave or whatever. Taxes, if you add up all forms of taxes— some of them are called user fees— are in excess of 50%. For the purpose of this conversation, I will use the word 'income' as defined for legal purposes by the government, but normally I don't use it, in order not to give the IRS a leg up. Off the top of my head, for them, income is something of a profit that one gains. This is not the definition in Black's Law Dictionary. Wages are not income, but property."

Patriots often referred to Black's Law Dictionary and certain court judgments to support their arguments. Two court decisions concerning wages as property not income, which they cited, were:

[The IRS] taxes only income "derived" from many different sources; one does not "derive income" by rendering services and charging for them. (Edwards v. Keith, 231 Fed. Rep. 113)

and,

Income excludes wages, salaries, tips. (Graves v. People of N.Y. exrel O'Keefe 59 SCt (1939)

"Very early on," said Tom, "in the New York state constitution it stated that a person's labor shall never be considered a commodity. Every person has a certain number of days on the earth. While you're here, there are certain things you need—sustenance and shelter. You trade a day's worth of labor for a day's worth of sustenance. There is not a profit made here. I know of very few working people with banking accounts in the Federal Reserve or Switzerland. It is a trading process; your labor is your property. Your signature is your property. You sign your name to a book and it is your property."

Patriots believed that income taxes were unconstitutional, and that the IRS, in any event, was not a legitimate government agency, since, along with the FBI and certain other agencies, it had never been formally chartered. I would struggle mightily with this over the coming months. It was one of the most difficult subjects for me to understand.

Tom continued, "In my civilian life, I was married at the age of twenty to a local girl. We had three children, two girls and a boy. I have one grandson, two years old. I worked blue-collar jobs—truck-driving and mechanics, sales work in hardware. Once, I rose to a managerial position. I raised a family and continued to think about those things. My wife was not interested, and thought too much of my time was consumed by such matters.  After twenty years we separated.

"With my truck-driving, I was out and around the country a lot, and was seeing that the news media was controlled as several units. News from one area would not get a hundred miles away unless it was approved. There were certain types of stories: for example, in one community a man had used a legally-owned gun to stop a rape in progress, and this story did not make it eighty miles. On the other hand, there would be a shooting over drugs, and it would make it all over. What was politically correct would make it down the road in either direction. What was not, was bottled up as a local interest story.

"I got to know a cross section of the country east of the Mississippi. I was talking to people. Even in Canada, people recognized the same symptoms, of a loss of liberty and a march toward a police-state-type of society where individual liberty was laid at the feet of the all-powerful state.

"One of the wakeup calls was the Gordon Kahl incident. He was a tax protester in one of the Dakotas. Federal agents staked him out on his way back home—he was with his wife and son, and a friend of the son—and they were ambushed by several marshals. The son was riddled with gunfire, and Gordon Kahl returned fire and killed more than one federal agent. He ran. They went into a manhunt. They caught up with him down in Arkansas a few months later and killed him along with a law enforcement officer named Sheriff Gene Mathews. Jack McLamb did an in-depth, multi-year, police-style investigation on Kahl's execution. His son is still in jail. A man named John DeCamp, who is a former Nebraska legislator, has also been investigating, and is close to getting them to reopen the case and bringing some indictments."

Gordon Kahl had been a sixty-three-year-old tax protest leader in North Dakota. A well-respected farmer and highly-decorated former Air Force officer in World War II, Kahl had begun speaking out in the mid-'70s at public meetings and on local television about the unconstitutionality of the Federal Reserve and IRS enforcement of the income tax. Taking a lead from the Internal Revenue Code, where the income tax was characterized as being "voluntary," Kahl advocated "non-compliance." (In Webster's dictionary, as patriots liked to point out, "voluntary" was defined as: "done, given, or made in accordance with one's own free will or choice," never under coercion.) The "tax rebellion" had quickly spread, and in 1977 Kahl had been identified by the IRS as the prime leader, and targeted for prosecution as a means of shutting down the movement. Kahl was convicted, however, only of two misdemeanors, under the IRS rules and laws for "failure to file a tax return." He was nevertheless subjected to felony prison and probation terms—that fell outside the law, Tom pointed out.

After serving a year in prison, Kahl made an effort through the legal system to resolve his differences over the remaining illegal probation terms. Believing that he had done so successfully, during the bad times for farms in the early '80s, he had resumed speaking out publicly, traveling around the country. Farmers, seeing their livelihoods threatened by what they considered unjust conditions imposed by the government, increasingly, had begun to speak of themselves as twentieth-century "patriots," harking back to the Revolution, invoking the First and Second Amendments.      

Rather than as a tax protester, Gordon Kahl was now generally portrayed in the mainstream media more often as having been a member of the "extremist" Posse Comitatus movement, to which many tax protesters in fact subscribed. The Posse Comitatus (meaning, "Power of the County") organization had emerged in the '70s and '80s in rural America during the various farm crises, in response to heavy-handed banking and government farm policies (toward small farms). Adherents believed that under the "Republic" of the Founders, it was the "county" that was meant to be the citizens' true "seat of government," deriving its authority directly from "The People."

The argument went that the states were not subdivisions of a central government (as they were often being treated), nor were the counties subdivisions of the states. On the contrary, the state derived its authority from the counties, and the federal government, in turn, derived its authority from the sovereign states. Therefore, the sheriff, who was the "first man of the county," elected to serve the people, and under oath to uphold, preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States of America, had the duty to protect citizens from unlawful acts, including by government agents. Permission to enter a county, they argued, especially by federal law enforcement, was required under the Constitution, from the sheriff.

Rural America being highly religious—no different from most of the world's rural societies—the Posse Comitatus movement, naturally, was heavily imbued with Christian fundamentalism. And it was on the most extreme of their religious beliefs—never the Constitutional issues—that the media regularly focused. Thus, Posse Comitatus adherents were made out to be a bunch of religious extremists, when there was much more to the movement. The movement peaked in the '80s, and its strong ideology of government power emanating from the grassroots greatly influenced patriots, and later, the early Militia movement.

On February 13, 1983, Kahl and his family had been ambushed by U.S. Marshals in plain clothes, using a road block, as recounted by several witnesses to the terrible deed. The marshals apparently did not know what Gordon Kahl looked like, and had only the description of what he had been wearing earlier that day. Prior to the ambush, however, at a tax-protest meeting that Kahl and his son and a friend had attended, Kahl had exchanged his jacket and hat with his son Yorie. At the road block, the group of officers, aiming their guns at the Kahl group, according to witnesses, yelled, "We're going to blow your goddam heads off," and, "You're going to die." Without any pretense of arrest, they proceeded to shoot son Yorie—thinking he was his father—in cold blood, four times with a .38 Special revolver and twice in the stomach with a shotgun.

Believing his son was dead, Gordon Kahl shot back, along with Yorie's friend, who had attempted to escape and been cut off wth gunfire. After killing two marshals and wounding the others, Gordon Kahl and the friend took Yorie to a hospital. Then, the elder Kahl fled. Several months later in Arkansas, the authorities caught up and executed him, along with the local sheriff. The house was burned down. Although the officials said the two men had been killed in a gun battle, Officer Jack McLamb, a former policeman, now a patriot leader, in an independent investigation, had recently concluded that Kahl had been shot in the back of the head with a .41 Magnum revolver while sitting at the dinner table (watching television for news about Yorie's trial) [with his friend] Sheriff Gene Mathews. When Sheriff Mathews had tried to leave the house, he also had been killed, by friendly fire. (It seemed that he had disregarded warnings to call off an investigation of Iran-Contra-related drug trafficking at the Mena, Arkansas airport, which I would learn more about later.)

The owners of the house, who were hiding Kahl, meanwhile, had been lured outside earlier, by an FBI special agent and the sheriff, and handcuffed to a police car. They watched as the bloody events unfolded. After hearing the gunshots, they watched the FBI and U.S. marshals, assisted by the local and state police, burn their house by inserting fuel through the roof vents and lighting it with smoke grenades and tear gas canisters. Evidence of accelerants was later found in several places, including on Kahl's charred body. Gordon Kahl's plight while he was on the run, had become a rallying cry for rural Americans protesting the IRS and its methods, and the authorities had been determined to destroy him and his cause. But the opposite happened: Kahl became a martyr.

Son Yorie Kahl, meanwhile, in what attorney John DeCamp described as amounting cumulatively to a kangaroo court—presided over by the same judge who had presided over the now-discredited, Wounded Knee-Leonard Peltier trial—was convicted of second-degree murder and conspiracy. Both Yorie and his friend were sentenced to life in prison. As part of a request on April 16, 1996 for a new trial for Yorie Kahl, DeCamp included a "Statement of Facts" describing how the "first testimony" before the jury at the trial had been "from the grieving widows of the dead marshals presenting studio photos of their husbands and telling of their children." At the same time, he pointed out, much exculpatory evidence had been disallowed, including the shoulder-holstered pistol that Yorie had worn, where it could be seen that Yorie's gun had been hit by the first bullet fired, by law enforcement, while it was still in the holster.

Yorie Kahl, argued DeCamp, had been represented by an "inexperienced civil attorney" appointed by the magistrate, who wasn't even in town during most of the time he was supposed to be preparing for the trial. Moreover, a lawyer who had traveled there to offer his services to Yorie, after meeting with the family, had been denied access to the defendant, and along with his paralegal-investigator, had been "harrassed, intimidated and threatened by federal and local law enforcement officers." The two had left, fearing for their lives. After son Yorie's trial, it said in the Statement of Facts, the lead prosecutor had declared, "We did everything in our power to make sure that they did not wind up having tax protester lawyers."

Attorney John DeCamp was an interesting figure in his own right; he was acquiring a high profile in the patriot community as a defender of their rights. A Nebraska state senator from 1976 to '86, before that he had been an Army captain in Viet Nam, where he had served with the CORDS pacification program under John Paul Vann and CIA Station Chief Bill Colby (with whom he had remained a close friend). In 1975, he had initiated "Operation Baby Lift," evacuating 2,800 Vietnamese orphans, and had been decorated and honored at the White House for his outstanding service. DeCamp had come to the attention of the patriots with his book, The Franklin Cover-Up, which described the links between the Franklin Credit Union, an Omaha bank that had collapsed in 1988 (during the savings-and-loan scandal), and drug-peddling, organized child abuse and satanic activity, involving prominent government and private-sector figures in Nebraska and Washington, D.C., along with the CIA. Colby had secretly helped with the investigation. I was to read this book later as part of my research, and would find it truly shocking.

Officer Jack McLamb (to whom Tom Church had also referred, as having conducted an independent investigation of the Kahl affair) had been one of the earliest supporters of the Militia movement. His own story as a patriot leader went back to the late '70s, early '80s, when he had been the most-highly-decorated police officer in Phoenix, Arizona. (He was forced into retirement in the mid-'80s due to injuries sustained during a drug bust.) McLamb today headed two national police associations: The American Citizens and Lawmen Association, and Police Against the New World Order. In the '90s, he had become a vocal opponent of the UN and the "New World Order." A charismatic Officer McLamb, looking something like a golden-haired, pink-skinned cherub in a policeman's uniform, exuding love and sounding like a New Testament Apostle, traveled around the country giving lectures to the police, calling for them to uphold their oaths of office to serve the Constitution. He regularly called for the police to support the People, not the system, which was corrupt.      

McLamb raised his voice regularly in support of the Militia movement (indeed, many policemen secretly belonged to Militias). In 1995 McLamb had written an article in his newsletter, Aid & Abet: Constitutional Issues for Lawmen and the Military," bearing the title, "Now is the Time for the Militias." The fomer policeman had begun, stating flatly, "The militia's legal function is to stop tyranny in government." What the Founders had called "citizens militia," "general militia," and "a well-regulated militia," he explained to his mainly-law enforcement audience, confirming what every Militiaman knew, "was the PRIVATE non-government-controlled militia, sometimes referred to as the 'Unorganized Militia.'"

The "unorganized" Militia, codified as such after the passing of the Dick Act in 1903, in Title 10, 311 (which Tom had quoted to me), as I was learning, had in fact come about largely because the U.S. had failed to create the intended, Swiss-style Militia. Unlike Switzerland, U.S. borders were not threatened, and citizens had been loathe to make the commitment; there simply hadn't been the will. Before the turn of the 19th century, the country had been under the strong pressure of the greedy, post-Civil War corporate robber barons, stirred by thoughts of further economic imperialism (that went beyond defeating the South)—much the same as today—in stark contrast to the sentiment that had prevailed at the time of the Founders, for a defensive force only. The Spanish-American War, with the venture into Cuba by Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders in 1898, and the occupation immediately afterwards of the Philippines, must have shown the fast-expanding new industrialists and financiers with roving eyes the limitations of a citizen Militia in any sustained, European-style foreign occupation. It would have been quite clear that a Swiss-style Militia could be viable only on the home front.

Just as important, while the requirement for all men between the ages of 17 and 45 to enroll and purchase weapons had been formally dropped under the Dick Act in 1903, it had also divided the Militia into today's "organized" and "unorganized" Militia. It was with the Dick Act that the National Guard had been created, defined as the "organized Militia," meant to be able to substitute for the regular army. Still, the National Guard was allowed to do so only on American soil; in 1912, just prior to World War I, the U.S. Attorney General ruled that the Constitution did not authorize foreign service by any of the Militia—"unorganized" or "organized." The predator barons would have to find another way to create a standing army suitable to war in Europe, and eventually the entire globe. Predictably, in 1916, with World War I already underway, a way had been found to get around the limitation, with The National Defense Act, which gave the president the power to draft members of the "organized Militia," or National Guard, into the regular army in wartime.

At first, the National Guard was administered under the Constitution's "Militia clause"—Article I, Sec. 8—which conferred on Congress the power "To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia," rather than under the "army clause," which authorized the Congress "To raise and support Armies." Soon after President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, however, this power was transferred, with the National Guard Act, to the "army clause," which meant that, just as the forces for another world war were beginning to make themselves felt, there was at last a sizeable standing army that could be sent overseas at any time. It could, in fact, for the first time, be sent overseas even in time of peace.

Soon, World War II was fought, after which, U.S. military interventions over the next half century followed in: Korea, Viet Nam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, and so on, none of which countries threatened America, along with numerous other, U.S.-made "low intensity" conflicts around the globe—all contributing to the creation of a parallel, U.S. national-security state that in the end served only global financial and corporate interests. (This, as I was learning, was the way the Militias saw it.)

Appropriately ambiguous, so as to satisfy the 1933 National Guard Act's opponents, House of Representatives Report No. 141, at the time, justified the transfer of the National Guard to the "army clause" in the Constitution, saying:

The primary purpose of this bill is to create the National Guard of the United States as a component of the Army of the United States, both in time of peace and of war, reserving to the States their right to control the National Guard or Organized Militia absolutely under the Militia clause of the Constitution in time of peace.

It was an oxymoron, of course, to say that the National Guard was both a component of the (regular) "Army" in time of peace, and at the same time, that the states retained the right to control it absolutely. In fact, today the National Guard could be federalized by the president at any time, taking it out of the control of the states, with or without their consent. (This was done in 1993 during the L.A. riots, patriots believed, to test public sentiment.) With the "organized" Militia now part and parcel of the regular Army, it was clear that only the "unorganized Militia" remained "the Militia" of citizens referred to in the Constitution and Second Amendment. It was clear from the Founding Fathers' writings, as well as the Dick Act, contrary to much of today's conventional wisdom coming from highly-regarded Constitutional scholars, that what the Militias were asserting was correct -- "unorganized" simply meant, "unorganized by the government."

Officer McLamb proceeded in his article on the Militias, to quote that most controversial of Thomas Jefferson's statements:

The tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots.

McLamb, however, asserted that "The formation of militias may prevent the necessity of their use." "Militias," he explained, "were part of the system of "checks and balances" within the United States. "And we as Officers of the Law have sworn to protect the Constitution and the People's rights. The militia is one of those rights."

McLamb, in his Aid and Abet, noted also that the Militia was being demonized as "White Supremacists," "Anti-Semites," "Neo-Nazis," "Gun-Nuts," "Radicals" and "Right-wing Extremists," which, he explained, was an old tactic to "make believe" patriots were "criminals or EVIL." The powers-that-be, he explained, were worried because if law enforcement and soldiers "took the time to actually know these folks," they "would support most of them in their stand against the anti-American gangsters presently in control of our beloved Republic."

While it was indeed not true that the citizen Militias were neo-Nazis and anti-Semites and such (though there were surely some of these individuals among them), what made it easy to label them "right-wing extremists" was many of the patriots' strong fundamentalist Christian beliefs, which were the legacy of the Puritans and Calvinists who had come to America as settlers seeking freedom from oppression, but who, ironically, were themselves highly intolerant. Today, among modern-day revolutionaries, it was this, in its various guises, with the strong anti-abortion and prayer-in-schools bent, that often made its presence felt in the public eye; today's American patriots, moreover, could be as intolerant as their Colonial forbears. Like the Puritans earlier, today's "religionist" minority saw America through the lense of the Bible, as God's Promised Land after the Exodus from bondage in England—their "Egypt." And because these minority religious zealots were often the most vocal among the patriots, the media paid them greater heed, which only served to make them even more vocal.

The more reasonable voices among the patriots and Militias, however, as I was finding, were routinely given short shrift. Some of these other voices were nevertheless quick to point out that the religious groups in the eighteenth century had eventually given way, with the Constitution, to Thomas Jefferson's idea of a separation between state and religion, which he had considered his crowning achievement. Unlike some of the other Founding Fathers, Jefferson had believed that outside the broad, general terms, religion was a private matter and its practice had no place in the conduct of public office. (Prayer, however, was not something he had thought should be banned at public functions, and although today, prayer had been abolished in public schools, interestingly, no one -- publicly, at least—had yet advocated banning prayer at the opening of Congress.) 

It would take me many months of intensive study to understand all this, with the many subleties and nuances. Sometimes I thought that what I had before me in my quest to understand the Militias—submerged as their core beliefs often were in a sea of secondary issues—was more akin to an exotic cult to conspiracy, with no rhyme or reason, complete with its own dogma and articles of faith. It often seemed that logic played no part.

This was until I began researching these beliefs, and going far, far back, deep into the history of what was taking place. There, I found that many of the Militias' beliefs were not so farfetched after all. Slowly, as I sifted through the Militia charges of a concerted pattern of government misconduct, and the various theories of means for redress of grievances, a whole new world opened up that I had not known existed. The Militias, it became clear to me, through their educational efforts, were putting the entire system on trial. Clearly, if they continued, today's system, as it had evolved—or been engineered, as patriots would say—could not survive. It was either the system, or the Militias.

Once I knew what the Militias knew, I was a changed person. And I realized I could never go back.

Officer McLamb, in his article, called eloquently on the police to do their own checking before following orders to "start shooting" or participate in any "dynamic entry." He ended with a warning to the "Globalists," saying:

Throughout our Constitutional history in America, no lawmen or soldier has feared good countrymen bearing arms, just the opposite. It is only when a government begins to enslave the people that the "leaders" rightly fear guns in the hands of citizens. 70,000,000 plus, GOOD AMERICANS (militia) own guns. And most, including, many of us in uniform... will see that those who would try to take them, DIE IN THE TRYING.

"Fire was used to conceal the crime," said Tom Church of the Kahl-Mathews execution. "The son was just a kid at the time. He survived the injuries and is maimed. He didn't do anything, but he's got a lifetime federal gig ahead of him in jail. He's a political prisoner. It is horrifying to see the types of things the government has done, mainly because of retribution. They had some of their hired guns killed, and there had to be retribution. They have to make the people fear them. When the federal guns come to your place, you'd better lay down. If you don't, they're gonna hunt you down like a dog and kill you. No trial. They're just gonna kill you. That was what was done to Gordon Kahl. 

"Then, there was a situation in Philadelphia in 1985 with a group called MOVE. Fire was also used against MOVE. In so doing, the city, by bombing them from an aerial platform, started a fire, and blocks and blocks of the city of Philadelphia burned to the ground. This was a horrific event. Once again, it showed that the government, if you resist them, they will kill you. Flat out, no trial, they will beat you. If you don't get the learnin' from that, they will kill you. This was covered in the propaganda pushed out by the Establishment media. J.J. Johnson, in his newsletter, recently told the story."

J.J. Johnson was a black founder and leader of the Ohio Unorganized Citizens Militia, who, with his wife Helen, published a popular Militia newsletter by the name of E Pluribus Unum (in Latin, "From Many One" -- the motto on the U.S. coat of arms). MOVE had been a tenants' rights movement, whose followers had been African nationalists living in a vacant building they had fixed up in Philadelphia, where they were squatting. In 1985, when they refused to leave, the City had evacuated everyone on the block, and had proceeded to bomb the MOVE house from a helicopter. Eleven men, women and children were killed. Several blocks burned down, leaving a whole neighborhood homeless. (While it was generally described as a local government operation, as it turned out, there had been assistance from the FBI, which explained why the Justice Department had declined to launch an investigation. Interestingly, former FBI agent (who, earlier, had personally infiltrated the Weathermen, Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, during the FBI's COINTELPRO operation) Frank Keating—governor of Oklahoma at the time of the "Oklahoma bombing," where there was also more to the story than met the eye—was Assistant Attorney General at the time.)

Tom continued, "Then there was the Randy Weaver story."

In the opinion of many, the single most important historical event leading to the emergence of the Militias had been Ruby Ridge—as the 1992 action by the federal government against the Weaver family in Idaho was generally known. More than anything else, the Weaver saga had set the immediate stage for the Militia movement, followed by Waco a few months later. 

At the time of Ruby Ridge, the tinder for a nationwide movement of armed American dissidents was just waiting to be ignited. All across the country, already, future Militiamen were outraged over the deceptive gun-control measures by the government, especially since Kahl's execution, which included widespread efforts to entrap gun owners, with undercover ATF agents regularly inciting ordinary people to break the law on some minor point, to force them to become informants. Federal law enforcement was systematically developing a countrywide network of Americans informing on their friends and neighbors, and patriots liked to point out that this was the way it had been in the Soviet Union.

There was smoldering outrage also at the increasing militarization of law enforcement; in the '90s, the police were being given military equipment that included tanks and armored personnel carriers and helicopter gunships. With these new toys, the police were also being given training by the military in the methods of outright war. Patriots believed there were secret plans to use them against the general population whenever it got out of line with whatever happened to be politically correct at any given moment—politically correct, that is, for the authorities and their masters, those powerful globalists beginning to unmask as the end of the millenium approached.

© 2000 Nita M. Renfrew