FBI Special Agent tends to Ruth Riddle behind a Bradley Fighting Vehicle during the Waco Siege, April 19th, 1993 (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Right wing militias are on the rise in America, but they are a much older problem than most people realize.
In 2020, I was fed up with the American education system, and having recently graduated college, I found myself jobless and stuck at home thanks to a rampaging pandemic. So I took it upon myself to start learning about the period of recent history which I was never taught in schools. This self-imposed initiative began when the War on Terror which was about to come to its conclusion with a hastily negotiated, terribly one-sided deal to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan. However, I found myself seeking to understand other conflicts, such as the Gulf War, and the end of the Cold War which led into the modern war on terror. Additionally, I came across a full upload of ABC 2000 Today, the 24-hour marathon coverage of the new millennium which Peter Jennings anchored for ABC. Looking back at a century filled with such dramatic events furthered my fascination with this era of time which I lived through or just barely missed.
Longtime readers may remember a five-part series I wrote last summer entitled The Child of Two Shadows. This was my attempt at summarizing more recent history which set the stage for the world we live in today’s world but happened “too recently” to be taught in schools. I grew up in the wake of 9/11 and the end of the Cold War and had little-to-no knowledge of the causes of world events which would define my childhood and young adult life. I wanted to synthesize a basic understanding of important events for those who, like me, had never understood or recognized their impact on the world today.
In my readings on the events of the 1990s, the leadup to 9/11, American public safety and policy, counterterrorism, a frightening truth began to reveal itself: the United States government believed that its goals justified the use of any means to achieve. It lent credence to people the majority of society would dismiss as crackpots who would then metastasize into an extremely dangerous cancer which threatens the country today. And it was only one step down the road which the American government would take once its focus shifted to foreign terrorists in the wake of 9/11 and the United States felt that nothing was a bridge too far in the name of safety for its citizens.
Response Teams
During the 1972 Olympics in Munich, terrorists from the Black September organization killed two Israeli athletes and took nine more hostage in a bid to have over two-hundred Palestinian prisoners released, many of whom had been convicted of crimes related to terrorism. The Bavarian police’s bungled response resulted in a protracted hostage situation and a shootout which resulted in all of the Israeli athletes dead. This prompted many national governments across Europe to establish dedicated counter-terrorism forces such as West Germany’s GSG9 (which remained during German reunification) or France’s GIGN. The failure in Munich was a costly lesson which European governments were quick to heed about the need for specialized counterterrorism units in their nations’ law enforcement arms.
The United States would not learn that lesson for another year, after the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation. What started as a peaceful occupation of Wounded Knee by Native American groups protesting the way treaties with the American governments had been roundly ignored turned into a tense seventy-three-day-long armed standoff with federal law enforcement. FBI agents from around the country were summoned to counter roughly two-hundred protestors, and their operations were marked by ineffective tactics, lack of communication and coordination, and an eagerness to resolve situations by force. The standoff ended with a peaceful resolution when the protestors agreed to disarm if their concerns were heard. The Second Wounded Knee did result in some positives, like legislation addressing the shortcomings, but it also highlighted many of the American problems dealing with civil matters. This event also prompted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to establish their first SWAT team. The uncoordinated federal agents with no experience controlling a scene or performing even basic tasks to manage an armed standoff made the Bureau look weak and threatened to cause a future volatile situation to spiral out of control without proper protocols in place.
The FBI’s SWAT branch would expand over the next several decades to encompass various other operational responsibilities. Several teams would join an ever-growing umbrella of federal tactical response units, one such group being the Hostage Rescue Team. Since the US military is not cleared to operate on American soil due to the Posse Comitatus Act, the federal government felt that it would benefit to have their own equivalent group of tier one special forces (such as the Army’s Delta Force or the Navy’s SEAL Team Six) dedicated to handling the types of situations seen in Munich in 1972. In 1983, the HRT was founded and has seen numerous deployments since its inception, including Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992, or Waco, Texas in 1993.
With the Cold War at its end, the federal law enforcement apparatus was restless. The former Soviet nations could barely afford to feed their citizens, let alone launch the intensive espionage programs into their former opponent which characterized the relationship between Moscow and Washington DC from 1945 to 1991. The FBI instead turned its immense resources inward to root out the growing danger from right-wing militias, white supremacist groups, and other domestic terrorists.
Some people thought they were too overzealous in their pursuit of justice and security.
Militias and Their Members
Anti-government militias have been around in their present form for around fifty years. The prototypical forms rose from the 1970s and 1980s, mostly in the shape of white supremacist movements. Many of their members were disaffected veterans who turned against the government, feeling spurned by the Vietnam War and the society into which they returned to disdain and being ignored. Many joined the military because of the desire to fight, only to feel slighted when they realize how little autonomy they had in military service. Others were feeling pushed out of their “rightful” place in society by the Civil Rights Movement and the gains by marginalized groups in their battles for acceptance.
Groups such as The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, The Order, and the Aryan Nations would lay the groundwork for the modern understanding of right-wing militias even though many of the ones from the 1970s and 1980s would not survive into the present day. Common themes would emerge: a desire for a white nation purged of all “undesirables,” an association with Christianity which in no way resembled the beliefs of actual Christians, and a strong distrust and hatred of the federal government. While the criminal activities of these groups would often land entire chapters in state or federal prison, several more would crop up to take their places.
The decentralized nature of these groups would resemble America’s later enemy: Islamic terrorists out of the Middle East. As previously described here, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to numerous militia groups springing up to fight back. The majority of them were Afghans from its dozens of ethnic groups fighting to protect their homeland, however, there is a number of Arabs which journeyed east to stand with their Muslim brothers in a struggle against the imperialist invaders. After the war, many of them returned home where they felt emboldened to continue their struggle against their own governments, many of whom were more secular authoritarian dictatorships. There was no centralized leadership across these disparate groups even if they ran in the same social circles. Events such as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in the United States or the 7 July 2005 London Underground bombings were undertaken by various groups with some to no connections with the largest Islamic extremist terrorist organization at the time: al Qaeda, the perpetrator of the 1998 embassy bombings, the 2000 USS Cole bombing, and September 11th, 2001. These groups all had similar goals and methods, followed many of the same teachings and opinion-leaders, however, were not a unified front. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), for example, continue to wage war against each other even today.
The American right-wing militias work the same way. They pull much of their ideology from the same sources, and agree on many of the same targets, even if one group isn’t directly involved in supporting the actions of another. Many of them were disaffected and felt slighted by the gains of marginalized groups in the United States. Those who signed up to fight felt that their “talents” were wasted. This sentiment exploded after the Gulf War in 1991.
The first large-scale deployment of the US military since the Vietnam War was to counter Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. In the years between the end of Vietnam and the beginning of the Gulf War, the United States military had switched from a conscription force to an all-volunteer military. Advancements in training, technology, and tactics had allowed the American armed forces to fundamentally shift how they operated. Large piles of bodies were unnecessary to throw at problems; the idea was to win conventional wars decisively through superior technology. Many of those who enlisted to fight the Soviet Union in the latter half of the 1980s found themselves soldiers without an enemy, as the USA and USSR made peace shortly before the fall of communism in Europe in 1989 marked the functional end to the Cold War.
Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait, however, gave many of these battle-hungry wannabe-warriors their shot at serving their nation in the glory of battle. The invasion of Panam in 1989 was such a small force, and the entire affair was over so quickly that it wasn’t seen as a real war. On the other hand, Iraq was, at the time, the fourth-most powerful military in the world. A massive UN coalition led by the United States was expected to struggle against Saddam’s military to eject them from Kuwait.
Weeks were spent preparing in the desert, getting members of the military amped up to kill Iraqis and visit destruction on the enemy. Operation Desert Storm began with a month-long protracted air campaign before the ground invasion began. In a hundred hours, the Iraqi military beat a path out of Kuwait with their tails between their legs. Most American forces didn’t see a second of combat, nor did they even fire their weapons except into the air in celebration at the end of the war.
After coming home to an ungrateful country which was increasingly becoming alien to a large number of disaffected, undereducated, and predominantly white men, large swaths of these veterans fell in with the various Christo-fascist, white supremacist, anti-government militia groups which were gaining momentum. Long-simmering frustrations by the dregs of society would quickly draw new members in, and laying the wood needed for a massive fire.
All they needed was a spark.
The Government’s Heavy Hand
The spark would come in 1992 in Ruby Ridge, Idaho. The Ruby Ridge incident began when US Marshals attempted to set up a trap to catch Randy Weaver for skipping a court date over an illegal sawed-off shotgun. Weaver had been holed up with his family in a cabin in the middle of nowhere for over a year. The Marshals and ATF had tracked him down and set up an ambush outside his cabin near Ruby Ridge, Idaho. The end result was Weaver’s son Sammy, his dog Striker, and one of the federal marshals lying dead after an exchange of gunfire. The FBI’s HRT then showed up to manage the scene. Their aggressive rules of engagement resulted in Weaver’s wife, Vicki, getting killed, and Weaver being wounded by an FBI sniper. Sammy’s friend, Kevin Harris, was also wounded in this gunfire exchange. Thus began a siege which ultimately lasted ten days and ended when civilian negotiators convinced Weaver to surrender. The FBI looked brutal and incompetent.
Ruby Ridge was the birth of the militia movement’s modern form in the United States. This simmering anger exploded, with many of the militia groups feeling as though the federal government was overstepping their rules to infringe on the people’s rights. Gun rights were a very hot topic amongst these militia groups, to the point where the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) was seen as “the enemy.” Ruby Ridge highlighted the failures of federal law enforcement and reinforced the arguments that the right wing militia groups were using. To these groups, the federal government was a corrupt institution which would use force to take from and punish those whose eyes had been opened to that corruption. The FBI looked incompetent and aggressive and seemed to be more dedicated to punishing Americans than protecting them. Ruby Ridge was an ego trip for the FBI and it exposed them as trigger-happy enforcers who wanted to shoot first and ask questions maybe.
Those arguments would be further validated a year later in Waco, Texas. Many of the right-wing militias and other groups who have an adversarial relationship with the United States government is the feeling of overwhelming persecution. They feel as though they are hopelessly outnumbered with their backs against the wall. Aggression by law enforcement will often provoke a dramatic response, especially for people who believe that they are operating for God and are being persecuted for it.
The Branch Davidians are an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventists. The organization saw a variety of organizational changes in its history leading up to David Koresh’s tenure as leader. The group fragmented when Koresh gathered a great deal of followers within the organization and eventually wrangled control over the Mount Carmel compound outside Waco, Texas. By 1993, the Branch Davidians were led by Koresh, living together as a community in their compound. The people believed that Koresh was the son of God, and that they were preparing for the end of the world and likely a fierce battle with the US Government. They wanted to be left alone but were prepared to protect themselves.
The Branch Davidians had a large stockpile of firearms, and the ATF had valid reason to believe many of them were illegal. They served a warrant with a massive group of federal officers to arrest Koresh for the weapons, arriving in a convoy of civilian vehicles packed into cattle trailers on February 28th, 1993. However, a news reporter asked a postal worker for directions to Mount Carmel. The postal worker happened to be Koresh’s brother-in-law, who tipped off the Branch Davidians. When the ATF tactical unit rolled up to serve the warrant, sloppy tactics and a refusal to follow normal doctrine resulted in a tense situation. Though it remains unclear who fired the first shot, it resulted in a massive shootout between the Branch Davidians and the ATF, including a failed attempt to enter the compound through a second floor window. The ATF pulled back after sustaining multiple casualties including four dead. Several Branch Davidians laid dead inside, several more were wounded, and the FBI were called to take over the situation.
The FBI siege of Waco lasted fifty-one days and was characterized by a kind of bureaucratic schizophrenia. The hostage negotiators tried to coax the Branch Davidians out by using traditional negotiation tactics of building a rapport with the subject. While slow, there was a somewhat steady stream of people who came out of the compound thanks to the work of Gary Noesner, the chief FBI negotiator. After much back and forth, Noesner got Koresh to agree to send out some of the children and other Branch Davidians. Eventually, Noesner convinced Koresh himself come out once Koresh was able to write his interpretation of the end of days, though Koresh kept stalling for time. Noesner was one of the few on the scene who understood that this wasn’t a traditional hostage situation because the majority of people inside did not want to leave. He had to convince Koresh and his followers to come out willingly. He saw 35 people leave the compound, most of them children. Nobody else came out once he was transferred away from the situation on March 25th. The negotiators were constantly frustrated because HRT antagonized the Branch Davidians endlessly. HRT refused to pass information to the negotiators which undermined their validity with the Branch Davidians, and command often sided with HRT. On top of that, HRT pulled tactics such as calling in a tank from the Texas National Guard to crush the cars of the Branch Davidians, blasting loud music and aiming searchlights into the windows for sleep deprivation, and maintaining a visible armed presence with weapons pointed at the building. HRT were constantly pushing for an aggressive tactical response to the situation.
The HRT would get their wish. After fifty-one days, President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno were becoming impatient and wanted a decisive end to the standoff. The FBI tailored the evidence they brought to their briefings with Attorney General Reno to ensure she would sign off on the use of tear gas. On April 19th, 1993, HRT fired incendiary devices to disperse non-lethal chemical agents into the compound coupled with tactical military vehicles pumping in more of the gas in an attempt to flush the remaining Branch Davidians out. Instead, a fire was started. It remains unclear as to whether the fire was started deliberately by the Branch Davidians or the FBI. The most likely explanation is that the fire was started accidentally by the FBI’s deployment of the gas. What is beyond dispute is that the fire burned down the Mount Carmel compound with seventy-four people inside.
Government critics had very valid points regarding how the FBI, ATF, and other three letter agencies handled both Ruby Ridge and Waco with a bumbling incompetence that raised the body count and fueled anti-government sentiments. Their responses to these situations would even invite Congressional rebukes. Regardless, Waco would take the fire lit by Ruby Ridge and turn it into a raging inferno.
The Waco siege happened because federal law enforcement wanted a clear show of force and an easy win after the fiasco at Ruby Ridge. Instead of arresting Koresh on his daily run in the morning when he was exposed with no fuss, ATF wanted a big show of force and to pose with the cameras in front of a huge room of illegal guns. To use the parlance of The Wire, they wanted “dope on the table.” Instead they got another national fiasco, even worse than Ruby Ridge. Ruby Ridge was a failure by the FBI to act with restraint. The initial raid in Waco was a failure by the ATF to apprehend Koresh in a responsible manner. The siege was a failure of the FBI to try negotiating in good faith. HRT didn’t listen to the negotiators and the FBI as a whole ended up looking abusive to the people of the nation.
Many of the right wing militia members had their fears of the government justified by the heavy hand in the early 1990s. With George H.W. Bush president in 1992 for Ruby Ridge and Bill Clinton taking office in 1993 for Waco, it didn’t become a partisan issue. It was proof for these people that the government itself, no matter who was running the show, was the problem and would do everything in its power to trample on the American people. It pushed them to take more drastic actions in response, especially with those who were present at Ruby Ridge and Waco to see the government’s actions with their own eyes.
One such man who was present at both Ruby Ridge and Waco was Timothy McVeigh. On April 19th, 1995, exactly two years after Mount Carmel burned to the ground, McVeigh parked a rental truck in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Shortly thereafter, the bomb hidden in the truck blew up and killed 168 people, wounding hundreds more. McVeigh was a disaffected young man who had always hated the government, wasn’t very social, and felt burned by his service in the military during the Gulf War. After watching the federal government burn people to death who wanted to own guns and live on their own accord, he chose to take action, and called Waco and Ruby Ridge as the direct reason he chose to set the bomb off in front of the federal building. Never mind that the majority of the victims worked at the Social Security Administration, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and that other agencies such as the Department of Transportation, General Service Administration, and Secret Service were represented among the casualties. Of the 168 people killed, only 60 weren’t federal workers. None of them were FBI or ATF. So, this great moment striking back against the evil government for those two botched standoffs was nothing more than killing people employed by Uncle Sam who had nothing to do with any of it. McVeigh showed no remorse and never made any appeals to his death sentence. He was executed in 2001.
The bungled responses at Ruby Ridge and Waco by federal law enforcement contributed to Oklahoma City and other attacks by validating the criticism of militant right wing fanatics. Lone wolves, like McVeigh or Eric Rudolph, who committed the Centennial Park Olympics Bombing, were people who felt like they needed to act to remove the undesirable influences. Unlike Al Qaeda, who had specific goals in mind and utilized extensive networks of dedicated individuals, the lone wolf attacks performed by most of the American domestic terrorists often reflect more of the beliefs of the individuals who commit them. Even though they are in service of loosely common goals, there is less uniting theses groups other than hatred for other communities. Certain figures may unify them for a time, but many of them suffer from the same issues as other extremist groups, namely that every group has a leader who believes they should be king.
The Frightening New Millennium
Domestic terrorism was all the rage for most of the nineties. It was the main concern of law enforcement, especially after Oklahoma City. Foreign terrorism happened overseas, but it seldom hit America. Only the 1993 World Trade Center bombing really stuck in the public consciousness, and even then, there were only six fatalities, and the damage was repaired within a year. It was a precursor to 9/11, and for those of the US government looking for threats abroad, it was a major deal. For the average citizen on the other hand, after Oklahoma City, the biggest threat was to come from within.
While the CIA was tracking Al Qaeda’s activities throughout the nineties, especially after the terror group settled in Afghanistan, the FBI was primarily focused on domestic terrorism in the lead up to 9/11. When the 1998 Embassy Bombings were carried out by Al Qaeda, the Bureau found that it was at a significant disadvantage while investigating. Without a large number of agents aware of what Islamic fundamentalism was about, or even more than a handful of agents who spoke Arabic, the FBI was slow and ineffective in responding to the Al Qaeda attacks of the 90s.
That’s not mentioning the CIA’s reluctance to cooperate. While there were rules in place to keep both agencies from sharing intelligence, they were designed to protect the American people from a centralized intelligence agency which could manipulate the population so thoroughly, much like the KGB did in the Soviet Union. However, due to the FBI’s high profile failures in recent years, it takes no stretch of the imagination to think the CIA was reluctant to cooperate with a law enforcement agency which had so dramatically given fuel to the opposition. In addition to smugness over the CIA’s more clandestine intelligence-gathering mission being more important to them than the FBI’s more in-bounds mission of criminal prosecutions, the CIA’s morally unencumbered way of doing business in the shadows would come into sharp conflict with the FBI’s dramatically public activities. Add to that where the FBI has been gaining headlines for their failures rather than their successes, and there’s a culture of mistrust and antagonism that put roadblocks into cooperation even while being compliant with the laws designed to secure American privacy.
September 11th was a massive inflection point for America as a whole. The aftermath of the worst attacks on American soil since Pearl Harbor and the deadliest terrorist attack on the nation since Oklahoma City exposed many fracture lines in the country. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dominated public consciousness. The nation’s priorities changed in the wake of the towers falling, and everyone’s fearful eyes were gazing out at other corners of the world while an ugly storm still was still brewing at home.
After 9/11, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s mission was readjusted, deemphasizing white supremacist movements and domestic terrorism in favor of focusing on foreign terrorism from hostile regions. This meant atrocities like the Charleston church shooting were allowed to happen unimpeded by federal investigators who would have previously been keeping more watchful eyes on these fronts. Gathering of out-and-proud neo-Nazis like the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville in 2017 would become much more commonplace, and using violence to solve political disputes would become the new normal. The FBI was too busy looking at threats abroad to realize the loudest calls were coming from inside the house.
In the wake of 9/11, an intense nationalistic streak appeared throughout the country. The feeling that everyone must stand with the country and chase out any who may seek to do it harm, even if those people are positively contributing to America, dominated conservative spheres. Immigrants were demonized, and non-white groups became the subjects of hate crimes at far greater rates. Conservative groups began that age-old practice of deciding who gets to be a “real” American and declaring others to be second-class if worthy of the presence at all. These attitudes fed the right-wing militias, making “Christians” feel the need to wage a holy war against “Muslims” not realizing they are the same breed of extremist which attacked America on 9/11. The justifications may be pulled from different books, but the hatred is the same. Hatred which is just as easily directed against their countrymen whom they feel are standing in the way of their goal: whether it’s liberty, security, or identity. The cognitive dissonance of feeling so American that they must tear down America is what makes these movements so dangerous: a proclivity towards violence and a lack of grounding in reality.
McVeigh’s mentality is reflected by conservatives today. The lack of recognition of authority and the feeling that extreme measures must be taken dovetailed with the increasing partisanship in the wake of 9/11, which resulted in a massive mob which believed in lies about a stolen election in 2020 and stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC on January 6th, 2021. The right wing militias were whipped up into a frenzy by Donald Trump after decades of misinformation campaigns stoking anti-government sentiments. The truth at the heart of it is that the government did commit enough mistakes and used too heavy of a hand often enough to give these people validity. The right-wing militia movement came from a generation of disaffected and disenfranchised men who taught their sons and their grandsons and created a massive bloc within the country that participates, or at least tacitly supports, the idea that the government needs to be destroyed with violence. That America is already in a civil war and members of various groups are dangerous traitors who need to be destroyed to either preserve America, or that everyone is guilty and the country must burn.
The most troublesome fact about the rise of the militia movement in the United States is that lawmakers in recent years have been courting these anti-government militias. The elected leaders responsible for upholding the current system of government are openly supporting those who are openly in favor of ripping it down. Mistrust of the government is at an all-time high, after the Bush administration’s lies to the world to justify the Iraq war, the abuses of power committed constantly by multiple presidential administrations, and a concentrated misinformation campaign where outright lies are peddled as having more value than the truth. On top of it all, a population so disillusioned or ignorant as to accept falsehoods as truth can easily become the anti-government champions of the very model of a corrupt politician simply because he gives them permission to hurt the people they hate.
Right wing terrorism is the most prominent form of terrorism in the United States of America today. Because it is so common, it is also the most dangerous. It is being supported by those on high and it represents a great threat to the rest of us. It is important to know why this movement exists and why people in it believe what they believe. It’s important to know the culture which has persisted through generations of these right wing militias. Its origin is found in generations of disillusioned men, generations of failed veterans, generations of incompetent law enforcement. Madmen think they are gods and convince dozens of people to march into the flames with them. The watchmen feel they are above the law, morality, and all concepts of ethical behavior if it means getting the job done. The ambitious stoke the fires of hatred to give them an army of angry barking dogs ready to tear apart any who stand in their way.
It’s important to understand where this spectre comes from so that the fire which has already consumed so many will not consume us all.
Ark of the Lost Angels 
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