Members of militia groups can start off merely telling stories around a campfire but over time turn to conspiratorial thinking, open hostility or even violent action. Sociologists who study militias have observed an increase in extremism in recent years.
Is this Field Day?” I asked through my car window on a chilly, rainy April morning in central Michigan in 2008. A lone man dressed in head-to-toe camouflage, whose hand was casually resting on an AK-47 rifle strapped across his chest, nodded and stepped aside on the narrow road. I drove ahead to a parking area next to an old, red brick farmhouse and several acres of soybeans. About 50 people were gathering at a spot where the fields met a wooded bog.
I have learned that there is important variation across militia groups. They fall on a spectrum. At one end are units whose activities are largely limited to outings for “grown-up Boy Scouts,” as several members described themselves at the Field Day event I went to years ago. At the other end are units that are openly angry, whose members plot violence against government officials and advocate overt white supremacy. Some of the latter stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
I grew up in a conservative, rural, East Tennessee community where firearms for hunting, target practice and personal protection are part of the culture. As a child, I learned gun safety and basic marksmanship, witnessed my father shoot and kill a rabid coyote that was trying to eat my pet rabbit, and, when I was old enough to legally do so, obtained my concealed carry permit.
Militia members often told me they long for a “simpler time,” when they insist that individuals—especially men—took more responsibility for working and providing for their families, where the federal government was smaller and not a substitute for self-sufficiency the way they perceive it to be today.
He showed little comprehension of why his argument did not apply to Black families who cannot pick up and move elsewhere for a variety of reasons, including financial barriers such as lower home values, caused by long-standing discrimination in lending and real estate markets. The depressed prices prevent them from selling a house and then buying one in a better school district.
I found this in my research as well. One constitutionalist group leader told me he believed that public demonstrations by militia units “remind the government that they serve the people and not the other way around”; he indicated that he believes militia units visibly exercising their Second Amendment rights to carry weapons keeps the U.S. government from moving toward tyranny.
Churchill says it “seems the millenarian wing has come to the fore.” Even though the exact millenarian percentage in the movement is difficult to judge, his observation resonates with what I have seen. Constitutionalist groups that previously ridiculed conspiracy fantasies have pivoted to saying things like they were “monitoring” or “researching” claims from the far-right conspiracy movement QAnon, even as they denied fully embracing them.
The January 6 insurrectionists also seem to embody a movement toward extremism. Participants believed they needed to “Stop the Steal” and do something to prevent their preferred candidate and their vision of the nation from slipping away. The incursion was a mass act of violence and a clear escalation from the disgruntled chatter about supposed election fraud that many had observed during the prior several months.
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