There’s a moment in Shane Bauer’s excellent article on his time with a so-called “border militia” in which his “patrol” simply savors the day.
It's windy and the sun is blazing in the cloudless sky. At the top of a small hill, Iceman takes a knee and Sandstone and I do the same. For several minutes, we look out over the valley, mottled with creosote bushes, sotol, and grass. I sense that for them, there is a romance to this—the open land, the distant mountains, the belief that they are defending the frontier in service of the nation.
That idea of finding something worthy is there also in writer Joe Lansdale’s fantastic essay on the reasoning of his Trump-voting neighbors.
It’s a chance for the bored and disappointed to play army, a way to justify having tons of guns and ammunition. They feel that if not for their vigilance, dead-eye aim, and concealment due to camouflaged pants and a Duck Dynasty cap, we would be standing on the edge of a precipice looking into the bowels of hell.
In both cases, the quixotic search for something to give rudderless lives a direction might be amusing, if not for the unifying theme: violence and bigotry.
The guys just can't believe how many Muslims there are in the country today. "Saudi fucking Aurora is what it is," Captain Pain says of his hometown in Colorado. "We need to kill more of those motherfuckers. I never seen so many fucking towelheads stateside."
Turning back the tide of racism, sexism, and bigotry? That’s a goal worth supporting. Sign up with MoveOn to make calls to swing state voters from home.
The people that Bauer found in the militia came from different regions of the country and different backgrounds, but they all shared something in common—a belief that somehow the nation wasn’t giving them what it should, and an acceptance of conspiracy theories of every kind. FEMA camps? Sure. UN “Blue Helmets” coming ashore to impose a one-world government? Absolutely. All of them seem deeply invested in a sort of end-times, fall of civilization narrative that sees them as the rightful successors in building what comes next.
"We all have different reasons to be here," Captain Clyde Massengale of the California State Militia's Delta Company told the new recruits at my first training. "Some might believe what is happening is something biblical right now. Some might believe it's the New World Order. Some might believe the New World Order is making what is happening follow the Bible. Who the fuck knows? Who the fuck cares?"
The “three percenters” who Bauer spent time with clearly believe that they are already involved in a sort of conflict, and talk about being in a “war zone,” though it’s a war zone in which not one of them has ever been the target of a single shot. Even so, they pick up their AR-15s, paint their faces in camouflage blobs, and wander through the desert playing ersatz Wolverines! with thoughts that their weekend warrior routine is somehow preparing them to be kings of the post-Apocalypse.
They draw their power from the same source as Lansdale's neighbors, who embrace the same feeling of importance and violent just-you-wait-ism.
Guns are a symbol of fear, but they are also a symbol of power, a way for the everyday person to feel important and potent, to be a participant in the great game show of life. Guns have replaced the previous religion of Texas, which was football, and Trump is the high priest. Fear sells, and it stimulates. Trump and his cronies constantly tell us, without actual facts, how bad crime is and how evil all foreigners are — especially if they dress funny — and they repeat over and over the false information that the economy is on the verge of collapse and you better build that bunker and stock up, because if you don’t, all you’ll have for protection from the certain rise of crazed liberals is harsh language.
While neither of these groups can clearly articulate the source of their looming fear, they don’t have to. Their actions speak volumes.
The militia movement effectively went dormant following the election of George W. Bush in 2000. Then came the first black president. In the three years after Obama took office, the number of active militias in the United States increased eightfold, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. By 2015, there were more than 275 groups in at least 41 states.
The fear is fear of the other. Black Americans, Muslim Americans, Latino Americans … any of them will do as well as Mexicans coming across the border. The fear is resentment of not holding a lofty position, earned or not. It’s a jealousy toward those who in the past, by dint of skin color or gender or both, enjoyed privileges the Rambo-fantasists imagine they no longer receive.
But they’re ignoring one big benefit they still get everyday.
While there’s a constant media attention paid to the slightest hint that any of these “others” might spread violence, militias and white supremacist groups are back-page issues, even when their members get in a hurry for that looming Apocalypse.
In 2010, a man in Idaho trained members of his militia to build bombs to fight off a communist invasion. The following year, the head of the Alaska Peacemakers Militia conspired to kill a judge and police officers. Also in 2011, members of a militia in Georgia planned to attack government buildings and random people with the deadly poison ricin, all to save the Constitution. In 2014, another group of Georgia militiamen planned to bomb federal facilities because they believed it would spark martial law and provoke a militia uprising. David Burgert, a Montana militia leader, shot at police officers shortly after being released from prison, where he'd served time for possessing illegal weapons as part of a conspiracy to assassinate cops and criminal justice officials to trigger a patriot revolution. He disappeared into the woods and remains at large. This October, three men belonging to a Kansas militia called the Crusaders were charged with domestic terrorism for allegedly plotting to bomb Somali immigrants on the day after the election.
If any of these things had been done by someone who was Muslim, or any of this violence had been plotted by people who could—within three degrees of separation—be associated with Black Lives Matter, they would be such fixtures in the media that their names would be burned into every screen in America.
Can you name any of these people? Do you know the men who planned to spread poison through the government? The men who plotted to bomb immigrants?
And there was Forever Enduring, Always Ready (FEAR), a small Georgia militia consisting of active-duty soldiers who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2011, its leader, Isaac Aguigui, asphyxiated his pregnant wife to get her life insurance money. He then spent nearly $90,000 on guns and ammo for the militia. He intended to buy land for training militias in Washington state and to further fanciful plots such as poisoning the state's apple supply, bombing a park, assassinating Obama, and ultimately overthrowing the government. When a teenage friend of Aguigui who was not a FEAR member heard about some of its plans, two militia members shot him and his girlfriend. Aguigui is now serving life in prison.
Read Bauer's article. The effort that he put into building an undercover persona and infiltrating the militia movement is admirable, and the writing is terrific.
And while you’re at it, read Joe Lansdale’s piece to see that the mentality Bauer found goes beyond just people running around in the desert hunting immigrants.