Behind The Militia Ideology
[su_center_b]
It’s not pretty.
As Daniel Levitas explains in “The Terrorist Next Door,” his 2002 book on the history of the militia movement, the ideology of today’s antigovernment extremists is built on the ideas first formulated by William Potter Gale, a racist and anti-Semitic California preacher who argued in the 1960s and 1970s that local “posses,” under the leadership of a county sheriff, hold the true law enforcement power in the country and must resist an oppressive federal government. But Gale’s ideas really took off when they were plagiarized and distributed by Mike Beach, a former member of the fascist “Silver Shirts” movement living in Oregon.
[su_center_ad]
[su_facebook]
D.B. Hirsch is a political activist, news junkie, and retired ad copy writer and spin doctor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.