Will Trump Lead Militias into Civil War?
Empowering Weak & OppressedKevin Barrett
Safar 14, 1442 2020-10-01
News & Analysis
by Kevin Barrett (News & Analysis, Crescent International Vol. 49, No. 8, Safar, 1442)
The American militia movement has always hated the US federal government—often with good reason. But today, a segment of that movement, alongside about one-quarter of the general population, exhibits cult-like adulation for the nominal head of the federal government, Donald J. Trump, a controversial figure who is reviled by the Washington establishment and by a great many ordinary people. As the polarization accelerates, brushfires of violence have been flaring up along the fault-lines. America’s roughly 20,000 militia members could play a decisive role in determining whether the sporadic chaos and violence explodes into all-out civil war.
The liberal-Zionist dominated mainstream media (MSM) have been sounding the alarm. Trump supporters, the media suggest, are a violent mob of heavily-armed racist rednecks, and the militias are the worst and most dangerous pro-Trump element. These deplorable heretics, the media tell us, refuse to accept the official triumphalist histories of America’s biggest wars, perversely choosing to side with the defeated Nazis and Confederates.
Militias, we are told, are anti-Semitic, racist, and incorrigibly violent. Avatars of the militia movement, according to the MSM, include such accused killers as James Alex Fields Jr., convicted of vehicular homicide in Charlottesville; Jake Gardner, an Omaha, Nebraska bar owner who died of suicide after being charged with killing a Black Lives Matter protestor; and Kyle Rittenhouse, charged with murder in connection with two shooting deaths in Kenosha, Wisconsin last August.
The reality is much more complex and nuanced than the picture painted by the MSM. Yes, most militias are white and conservative, and there are some racist militia members. But there are also African-American militias. One of them, the Not F*ing Around Coalition (NFAC), marched with over 1,000 armed men in Stone Mountain, Georgia, last July 4, protesting the gigantic stone effigies of Confederate leaders.
Militias in America—whether black or white, left or right—consist of armed civilians who interpret the 2nd Amendment as protecting universal gun ownership for the purpose of empowering ordinary people to organize to defend themselves and their communities, outside of (and if necessary, against) the uniformed, official, government-sanctioned police and military. Perhaps surprisingly, federal law supports them:
§311. Militia: composition and classes
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age…
(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 the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
Members of the militia movement consider themselves part of the unorganized militia authorized in the above-cited law, in accordance with the vision of informally-organized community self-defense as enshrined in the 2nd Amendment.
The militia movement as it exists today took shape in the 1990s. Its self-assigned task was tenacious defense of the United States Constitution in general and the Bill of Rights in particular. The founders of the earliest militias, including the Michigan Militia and the Montana Freemen, believed that the federal government had been captured by Zionist international banking families and turned against the American people. (The militias popularized the acronym ZOG, “Zionist Occupied Government,” referring to the fact that Zionists have seized de facto control of America through their domination of the media and banking sectors, and then leveraged that control in politics.) The militia movement’s founders correctly saw that the USA was on a slippery slope toward total tyranny, and that the Bill of Rights was becoming a dead letter. The massacres of American civilians by federal forces at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in August 1992, and in Waco, Texas in April 1993 outraged them and spurred the rapid growth of the movement. The full story is told in the as-yet-mostly-unpublished A History of the American Militia Movement: America’s Shooting Edge by Nita Renfrew.
Then on April 19, 1995, US government agents (presumably affiliated with the neocon faction that would go on to orchestrate 9/11) blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people including dozens of children. Though the neocons may have initially hoped to blame Iraq and launch a US invasion, the blame quickly shifted, perhaps under pressure from Clinton Administration higher-ups, to the militia movement. Federal agent Timothy McVeigh, who had unsuccessfully tried to infiltrate several militias, was served up as the designated patsy, and the media portrayed him as a typical militia nutcase.
The FBI and other federal agencies complicit in the bombing saw their anti-terror budgets soar, and the government clamped down on the militia movement just a few years after its launch. But the militias soldiered on, and individuals and media networks affiliated with them were among the earliest activists in what would become the 9/11 truth movement.
Before Trump ran for president, the vast majority of the militia movement was Constitutionalist, not racist. Ron Paul, the libertarian who was cheated out of the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, was their hero. But coinciding with the rise of Trump, a white identitarian current grew, championed by such public intellectuals as Jared Taylor and Kevin MacDonald. Trump’s outsider status, and his barely-disguised racism and nativism, fired up white, rural, downwardly-mobile sectors of the electorate, including some in the militia milieu, setting the stage for what could become a violently-contested 2020 election.
Groups like the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) are already war-gaming what will happen if Trump refuses to concede defeat. One unsettlingly likely scenario: Returns on election night show Trump winning a resounding victory, even though he really lost. Why? Because Republicans, uncowed by COVID, will overwhelmingly vote in person, and have their votes counted immediately, whereas germ-averse Democrats will mostly vote by mail. So, all Trump has to do to try to stay in power is claim a landslide victory on election night, then declare that the subsequent counting of mail-in ballots is cheating intended to deprive him of his victory.
Would Trump really do a thing like that? Of course, he would. He has been setting the stage for precisely this scenario by loudly attacking mail-in voting, sabotaging the postal service, and announcing that he is considering violating the Constitution by serving three terms, not just two, because he is “entitled.” In short, he may be planning to roll back American democracy, such as it is, and install himself as dictator. How ironic that the man who promised to build a wall to keep Latin America out of the United States could go down in history as the USA’s first “El Presidente.”
If Trump declares victory, and his henchmen try to stop the counting of mail-in ballots, demonstrations and riots will erupt that will dwarf the recent antics of BLM-Antifa. At that point Trump might call on his armed supporters to quell the chaos, prevent the counting of mail-in ballots, and come to the White House to protect him. Many in the militia movement, as well as sympathizers in the police and military, might heed his call. The upshot: Generalissimo Trump, after a bloody civil war, would either be enshrined as dictator-for-life of the American Banana Republic, or he and his forces might go down in the general bloodbath, as a pseudo-left-wing dictatorship takes shape under the stern gaze of Commissar Kamala.
Whichever way it plays out, the final demise of the American Republic in a second civil war would, ironically, represent the ultimate nightmare of the original, Constitutionalist militia movement.
