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But it was the Contra war against the leftist Sandinista (FSLN) government of Nicaragua that allowed a kind of populist “Wild West” scenario to develop, which brought the evangelical movement that had begun in the 1970s to own a war. While campaigning for president, Reagan had vowed to overthrow the “communistic” Sandinistas, and by the end of 1981, incursions by CIA-trained commandos into Nicaraguan territory had begun. The Reagan administration used the military-ruled friendly country of Honduras as the platform for training and arming several factions of anti-Sandinista Nicaraguans, principally the ousted Somoza’s National Guard members. Under the leadership of evangelical celebrity preachers such as Pat Robertson, white evangelicals created a minor Christian Crusade that lasted for most of the 1980s, until the Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1989. The evangelicals delivered not only humanitarian assistance and Bibles, but also military surplus weapons—U.S. mercenaries and missionaries crawled all over the borderlands of Honduras and Nicaragua and mobilized their congregants at home. Militarization of U.S. culture was a rich setting for the organization of armed groups in the United States, loaded with conspiracy theories, a primary one being that liberals wanted to violate their sacred rights and confiscate their guns.
In Against the Fascist Creep,7 writer and activist Alexander Reid Ross traces the genealogy of the racist groups that descended from several sources during the Reagan era and gained momentum and followers in the 1990s with the advent of the Internet and social media, forming a key constituency of the Republican Party, and creating some cross-over affinity with a number of leftist and anarchist groups. Ross seeks to trace why and how “fascism”—under which rubric he includes white supremacists, antigovernment militias, and other right-wing groups—“creeps into the mainstream and radical subcultures.” Ross is also concerned that some left-leaning and particularly anarchist and libertarian individuals and groups incorporate right-wing populist ideas, often without realizing their source.8
The campaign of George Wallace (the former segregationist governor of Alabama) for president in 1968 mobilized many of the elements that would effect the radicalization of the N.R.A. as well as racist groups flourishing in the 1970s, especially a revived Ku Klux Klan. However, Louis Beam, the head of the Texas Klan, began promoting the ideology of “leaderless resistance,” which was adopted by the Posse Comitatus. One of first visible actions based on that ideology took place in Arkansas in 1983, when tax resister and Posse Comitatus member Gordon Kahl refused to be served with a subpoena and instead started a gunfight, killing two marshals. He was pursued and shot dead by police, but became a martyr to the burgeoning movement. One of Beam’s protégés in the Aryan Nations group, Robert Mathews, emulated the leaderless secret-cell concept in organizing a new white nationalist group, “The Order.” The group raised millions of dollars by counterfeiting money and robbing banks and armored cars, using the proceeds to establish a network of safe houses all over the country and to fund other white nationalist groups. The Order collapsed with Matthews’s death at the hands of the FBI after The Order, in 1984, assassinated Denver talk show host Alan Berg, who debated right-wing callers. The others involved in the network were rounded up and imprisoned, with one of their number, David Lane, becoming a celebrated white nationalist prisoner, his “14 Words” becoming sacred to neo-Nazis and other white nationalists. Those words are: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The Feds put Beam and other leaders on trial and implicated still more, but only three were charged, and they were acquitted by jury trial.9
The Order was short-lived but inspiring to a later group calling themselves “Patriots,” a movement that began the organization of what they called “sovereign citizens.” Aryan Nation supporter Randy Weaver became the most famous of this movement. Weaver came from an evangelical Iowa farm family and was a Vietnam-era veteran stationed at Ft. Bragg for three years. Honorably discharged from the U.S. Army, he married in 1971 and enrolled at University of Northern Iowa to study criminal justice, hoping to become a FBI agent. He soon dropped out and took a job in the local John Deere factory. His wife, Vicki, raised evangelical, became increasingly fanatical in her belief in the impending end of the world.
In the early 1980s, the Weaver family bought a small, undeveloped property in a remote area of Idaho (near the town of Naples and the Ruby River), built a cabin, and home-schooled their children. In 1985, after attending some meetings of Aryan Nations, the couple was visited by the FBI and the Secret Service; they denied any affiliation. The FBI decided to try to recruit Weaver as an informer, a scheme that went awry with overlapping federal agencies working at odds with each other, and ended in Weaver being charged with possessing illegal weapons in January 1991. With some confusion in trial dates and Weaver not showing up, federal marshals attempted to arrest him at his remote home, where for ten days in August 1992, he and his family holed up and held off FBI snipers and some four hundred armed federal authorities. Vicki was shot and killed holding their ten-month-old baby; their fourteen-year-old son was shot and killed, as was the family dog; one federal marshal was also killed, and a wounded Randy Weaver surrendered, ending the siege. During the ten days, a crowd of assorted white nationalists and skinheads gathered outside the perimeter to support the Weavers, one prominent individual being Bo Gritz, the most highly decorated Green Beret in the Vietnam War, the real-life figure behind the Rambo character that Hollywood cashed in on and milked dry. Gritz was close to David Duke and a member of Willis Carto’s Populist Party. Alexander Reid Ross writes: “Gritz was a symbol of veterans for whom, like the Freikorps [in Germany], the war had not ended. They believed that Vietnam had been lost due to the protesting hippies and corrupt political class who sold out Middle America. The Right had to defeat the enemy at home—the feds and the hippies—to put America to rights, reversing the changes of the civil rights movement and returning the U.S. to its former glory.”10
Thanks to government overreach by several different uncoordinated, even competing, agencies in pursing Weaver and the botched siege that killed three members of the family all of this playing out on television the image of the right-wing movement took on an aura of victimization by big government. Much public and press questioning ensued. Government investigations determined that the rules of engagement employed in the confrontation were unconstitutional. Weaver’s lawsuit against the government was settled in his favor. A sympathetic book and television movie followed, as well a number of ballads, one by the progressive bluegrass musician-composer, Peter Rowan. His “Ruby Ridge” single and the album containing it soared on radio stations’ and country and other music charts in 1996, and could be heard played by local musicians unrelated to white nationalism.
Patriot militias sprouted around the country advocating for the citizenry to arm itself and resist federal authorities, accelerating with the federal siege of the Branch Dravidian compound in Waco from February 28, 1993, when the ATF raided and killed five of the members, through April 19, 1993, at which time the compound went up in flames, killing seventy-six people inside, with only nine escaping the fire. One young man, a disgruntled veteran of the 1991 Gulf War, looking for a way to direct his anger at the federal government, was present outside the perimeter of the compound when it burned. Exactly two years later, on April 19, 1995, this man, Timothy McVeigh, parked a truck full of homemade fertilizer explosives in front of the federal building in downtown Oklahoma City. For the Patriot movement, which McVeigh by then identified with, April 19 is a sacred date, the anniversary of the famous 1775 ride of Paul Revere.
The Patriot movement’s antigovernment ideology, along with a reverence for private property rights and, of course, the Second Amendment, melded well with the rise of institutionalized libertarianism in the early 1970s, including the founding of the Cato Institute by Charles Koch of the Koch Brothers with their petro-industries fortune and Murray Rothbard, who touted anarchist-capitalism and espoused anti-imperialist and pro-revolutionary views usual
ly identified with the left. Citizens for a Sound Economy was founded in 1984, with Republican U.S. congressman from Texas Ron Paul, a libertarian, as chairman. This organization was the prototype for the later Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity that spawned the Tea Party demonstrations at the beginning of the Obama administration, in time electing members of Congress and by the end of the Obama presidency, dominating the House of Representatives. In the mix was the rise of Silicon Valley libertarianism, loaded with cash.11
The 1970s and 1980s also saw the birth and development of the environmental movement at local, national, and international levels. While often at odds with the mainly white and well-endowed environmental organization, the Native American movement had long fought for their land, water, and treaty rights in the West. In some places, such as Nevada, a coalition of some environmentalists, some ranchers, and the Shoshone and Paiute Indigenous communities took on the federal Bureau of Land Management and other federal agencies controlling the vast public lands in the West that had been taken in wars against the Native peoples in the late nineteenth century and after. At the same time, the “Sagebrush Rebellion,” made up of mining, timber, and recreational industries, along with loggers and mill workers, and populated by an array of libertarians, populists, and conservatives, came to be called the “Wise Use” movement, demanding that all federally held lands be turned over to the states and privatized. They had little success until Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, and appointed one of their number to be Secretary of the Interior, James G. Watt. In addition to fighting to crush the environmental movement, “Wise Use” adherents targeted were the Native American communal holdings under U.S. trust protection, the reservations. A visceral hatred for Mexicans migrating over the southern border was integral to this movement, with its strong white nationalist roots. During the first decade of the new millennium, hardcore white supremacist groups formed militias the “Minutemen” along the Mexican border. Armed anarchists opposed them.12
While the “Wise Use” movement, and the later Tea Party movement, presented as grass-roots movements, in reality the driving force and funding came from oil industry megacorporations such as Amoco, British Petroleum, Chevron, and ExxonMobil as well as other giants—Dupont, Yamaha, General Electric, General Motors—and well-endowed organizations including the American Farm Bureau, National Cattlemen’s Association, National Rifle Association, Cato Institute, Koch Industries, among many others.13
The FBI, during the George W. Bush administration, issued a highly redacted unclassified report titled “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement” that warned of a concerted, decades-long attempt by white supremacists to infiltrate police forces. The report states, “The term ‘ghost skins’ has gained currency among white supremacists to describe those who avoid overt displays of their beliefs to blend into society and covertly advance white supremacist causes.”14 Professor of law and former military police captain Samuel V. Jones, writing about the continual police shootings of young Black men, argued that the incidents should be investigated in light of the FBI report: “Several key events preceded the report. A federal court found that members of a Los Angeles sheriffs department formed a Neo Nazi gang and habitually terrorized the black community. Later, the Chicago police department fired Jon Burge, a detective with reputed ties to the Ku Klux Klan… . Thereafter, the Mayor of Cleveland discovered that many of the city police locker rooms were infested with ‘White Power’ graffiti. Years later, a Texas sheriff department discovered that two of its deputies were recruiters for the Klan.” Professor Jones noted that the steep rise in white nationalist groups between 2008 and 2014 grew from 149 to nearly a thousand, which paralleled the rise in police shootings of Black men.15
Forty-four percent of military veterans own firearms, and military service is the strongest predictor of gun ownership, according to a survey conducted in 2015.16 White nationalists also proliferate in all branches of the U.S. military, especially the Army and the Marine Corps. “They call it ‘rahowa,’” said T.J. Leyden, “short for racial holy war—and they are preparing for it by joining the ranks of the world’s fighting machine, the U.S. military. White supremacists, neo-Nazis and skinhead groups encourage followers to enlist in the Army and Marine Corps to acquire the skills to overthrow what some call the ZOG—the Zionist Occupation Government. Get in, get trained and get out to brace for the coming race war.”17 Leyden served in the Marine Corps from 1988 to 1991 while a member of a white supremacist skinhead group, and has since renounced his former politics. He told Reuters, “I went into the Marine Corps for one specific reason: I would learn how to shoot,” so as to take his military skills back to train other proponents of white power.18 Military authorities make the “few bad apples” argument when queried about the issue, but Leyden claimed that he was very open about his beliefs, including having two-inch Gestapo lighting bolts tattooed about his collar and displaying a Nazi swastika on his locker. The military can also grant what it calls a “moral waiver” to allow felons or other ineligible recruits to join. Such recruits grew from close to 17 percent in 2003 to nearly 20 percent in 2006, according to Pentagon data. Military spokespersons claim that the waiver does not allow racists to join, but their vetting of applicants for white power affiliations is ineffectual. The situation worsened with the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after the new millennium.
For his 2012 book Irregular Army, British investigative journalist Matt Kennard carried out extensive interviews with veterans who held extremist views, as well as with leaders of white nationalist groups who encouraged their followers to gain military training for a race war that they planned to provoke. Kennard quotes a 2005 U.S. Department of Defense report: “The Military has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell” policy pertaining to extremism. If individuals can perform satisfactorily, without making their extremist opinions overt … they are likely to be able to complete their contracts.”19
Although white nationalist groups such as the John Birch Society and White Citizens Councils were founded in the 1950s in response to the Civil Rights movement, the Ku Klux Klan had never lost its white populist support in the South or in industrial urban areas of the North and West. The early Civil Rights movement was strongly committed to nonviolent direct action, which was very effective in garnering widespread exposure in the South, nationally, and internationally. However, in North Carolina, the president of a local Monroe chapter of the NAACP, Robert Williams, who had succeeded in desegregating the local public library and swimming pool in Monroe, called for self-defense against white violence and terrorism. Williams and his partner, Mable Williams, organized the local Black community and formed an armed self-defense group, the Monroe Black Armed Guard. When the couple received death threats and were hit with trumped-up kidnapping charges, they fled to Cuba, where Williams wrote his classic book Negroes with Guns.20 Similarly, in 1964, Black Civil Rights organizers in Louisiana formed the Deacons of Defense and Justice to provide armed self-defense from the police and the Klan.21 However, it was not until the 1966 appearance of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, that bearing arms emerged as strategic alternative to the nonviolent resistance of the Civil Rights movement.
In response to chronic police violence and abuse in Black communities, Huey Newton conceived of the Black Panthers as a way to monitor police and protect African Americans with armed citizen patrols. California did not restrict the carrying of loaded long guns if the weapon was visible and legally acquired. Very quickly, the California state legislature, backed by the new governor, Ronald Reagan, began working on legislation to outlaw open carry. On May 2, 1967, when the bill was being debated, more than twenty Black Panther women and men, armed with loaded rifles and shotguns, marched up the Capitol lawn and into the Assembly Chamber. They were disarmed and later arrested. At the police station, Bobby Seale read a statement: “The Black Panther party for self-defense calls upon the American people in general and the black people in particular to take careful note of the racist
California Legislature which is considering legislation aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of black people.”22 Not only in California, but around the country, states legislated gun regulations.