Hutaree Raid: An extremely well-executed federal operation aimed at the threat represented by the revitalized militia & Oath Keepers.

As a powerful political counter-stroke it was masterful. You have to give them credit. Putting a provocateur into a group of not-very-well wrapped Millennialists (see Churchill, To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrants Face) and assisting them to:

a. build and distribute pipe bombs and

b. talk about plots to kill cops that involve killing innocents, family members, etc.,

was well thought out, perfectly targeted, craftily planned, brilliantly executed and impeccably timed.

I realized this when I was outside talking to the three cops who showed up at my door to collect the birdshit Easter card. To begin with, the phone rang. Would I please meet the officer outside? Sure.

So I walked out in my shirtsleeves, thinking I would simply hand the guy (remember, I had been told they would send one officer) the ziplock bag, fill out a report, and then could go turn in after a very exhausting day.

I wasn't even off the porch before I understood something very different was going on here. Three deputies, not one. Spread out, hands on weapons, bright light in my face, commanding me to come to them. It was so ludicrous I laughed and said, "What? You want me to put my hands in the air?"

They didn't but they weren't laughing either.

Look, I told them, I just called you guys because that's what the Coroner's Office told me to do. They were tense as hell. Two of them knew me from local Pinson events, political and otherwise. The other, the one with the least experience, was the most obviously nervous and he's the one who approached from the side always training the light in my eyes.

So, after I get them calmed down and explain what is going on, it becomes obvious that they are concerned that I am a maddog militiaman. The Hutaree business was fresh in their minds. "Christian militia." "Kill cops at the funeral."

They're "militia." I'm "militia." I actually think they expected me to defend the assholes. As we had some time before the fire department trucks got there (and then they decided they weren't equipped to handle the situation so they asked for HAZMAT backup), I started talking about the many death threats I have had over the years and about my belief that it is better to be despised by the despicable than admired by the admirable. We talked about death threats in 90s, and my ever expanding list of enemies. I told them about how the FBI had been letting certain neoNazi terrorists run free back then, and how we -- the constitutional militia -- embarrassed them finally into arresting the pukes. I told them how we worked with state and local law enforcement to prevent racist-terrorist initiated clouds of pink mist here and across the country.

They just kept coming back to the Hutaree.

And it wasn't, I sensed, merely because it had just happened. The details of the thing as reported in the media and passed along by "cop telegraph" -- based entirely on the word of a federal provacateur at this point -- had seized their imaginations. "Christian Militia." "Assassinating a police officer." "Mass killing of cops' families at a funeral." "At a FUNERAL."

"Militiaman" = "Cop killer" As obvious as two plus two.

For the Imperial Feds, this was a propaganda coup of the tenth order of magnitude.

For this wasn't really about the Hutaree. It was about the revitalized constitutional militia movement and Oath Keepers. It may not have started out to be, when they began their operation against the Hutaree back in 2008, but at some point along the line, I'll bet, somebody saw the opportunity and took it.

Based upon the nervousness, fear and hatred of the Feds for Oath Keepers (as evidenced by the number and frequency of their verbal attacks on it), we knew that at some point they were going to feel compelled to get serious about dealing with the threat OK posed to their strategic certainty. (That is, "if I issue this tyrannical order, will these people carry it out -- or turn on me?")

Gentlemen and ladies, you just witnessed the seriousness of their intent to discredit Oath Keepers. The Hutaree meme strikes at the seam between the military and police who are attracted by the Oath Keepers' simple message, and the armed citizenry who are their natural allies in supporting and defending the Constitution and in the maintenance of order in society as a whole.

The Hutaree, apparently useful idiots to a man, may indeed not be guilty of what they are charged. It does not matter. Even if all the charges are later expoosed to be the fevered imaginings of snitches and provocateurs (and I don't think they will be), the Feds have reaped an incalculable benefit from the exercise.

They have, in the minds of every cop in America, equated the word "militia" with the word "cop killer."

From now on, every cop will approach us with that in mind. Every conversation about militia will have to deal with the Hutaree first. The Feds have put us all on the ideological defensive. The fact that it enunciates a lie does not matter. People will "know" from now on that all militiamen and women are copkillers.

Brilliant. You must give them credit. It was brilliant.

More on this subject later.

Mike
III