Blaming the messenger while the neo-Nazi and Klan leadership chortles.

White Aryan Resistance leader Dennis Mahon.

Brent J. Budowsky takes Matt Drudge to task, "Dear Matt Drudge: Stop the race stories."

Budowsky is a former Democrat congressional hack/staffer and political opinion writer and blogger for publications including The Hill, the LA Progressive, and The Huffington Post. He writes Drudge:

Am I suggesting you are giving aid and comfort to those who are racist, or those who play the politics of race for partisan gain? Absolutely. You bet. A visit to the Drudge Report at any given time in recent months bears witness to story after story, time and time again, day after day, week after week, month after month, of a laundry list of stories with racial innuendo and suggestion and implication that I would like to believe are below the standards you would set for yourself and your profession.

I guess he's talking about stories like this and especially similar stories that make up Colin Flaherty's book "White Girl Bleed a Lot": The return of racial violence and how the media ignore it.

Presumably Budowsky finds books describing the unapologetic anti-white racist behavior of the Holder "Justice" Department such as Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department by J. Christian Adams objectionable too.

Now, place that into the context of the Democrat triumphalism about how "angry white men" are now going to be permanently disenfranchised by the new coalition of blacks and Latinos -- that 2012 was their last chance to use politics to impose their "racial patriarchy" on all those "people of color" and the LGTB folks.

If the statistics show that there is one heckuva lot more racially motivated attacks by blacks on whites (and they do), and that local, state and federal authorities are reluctant to bring those attackers to justice because it is not politically correct (see current Flaherty WND link above) AND that people like Budowsky are trying to get others to shut up about it -- essentially, to cover it all up -- then you've got a perfect petri dish for ethnic cleansing in this country. Did you think there was some sort of house rule against it? Why it is already happening in Los Angeles, with Latino gangs murdering blacks and driving them out of neighborhoods.

Back in the 90s, I was talking on the telephone to White Aryan Resistance leader Dennis Mahon, who was trying to convince me how easy it would be to start a race war in this country, "We'll just go into white working class neighborhoods in blackface and do drive-bys, then we'll clean it off and go into black neighborhoods and do the same thing." Mahon, who sits today in a federal prison, was convinced his plan would work. I didn't think so back then. Now, after 20 more years of PC and anti-white racism, especially after 4 years of the Holder regime, I think his plan just might work.

My sources say that the folks who are most tickled pink about the re-election of Obama are not Democrats but the intellectual leadership of the neo-Nazi and Klan organizations. They believe that four more years of Obama should give them the right conditions to enact ethnic cleansing.

If there is a confluence of a rising tide of racial violence from blacks and Latinos against white folks, and a deliberate refusal of the "legal authorities" to deal with it combined with a very real sense of complete political disenfranchisement, then some white folks -- prodded by the Klan and neo-Nazis -- may decide to settle the next election by driving out that part of the electorate beforehand. It has happened before in this country.

(See, among others, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War or Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America by Elliot Jaspin.)

My own history of fighting against the Klan and neo-Nazis as part of the Constitutional militia movement is a matter of record. (See also To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement by Professor Robert H. Churchill.)

But the titanic forces that the racists of all colors want to unleash and that politically-correct Democrat party hacks like Budowsky want to cover up despite the plain reality that everyone understands will sweep all the best intentions away as everyone begins to believe that people of a different color who are trying to kill them must themselves be killed in "preemptive self-defense."

And, somewhere, Dennis Mahon will be laughing.

The new threat to the U.S. Army: "Anti-federalists." West Point professor decides to dabble in "domestic extremism."

Meet Arie Perliger, West Point professor now dabbling in "domestic extremism."

Many thanks to the reader who forwarded me the link to this article: "Identifying Three Trends in Far Right Violence in the United States."

The author, Arie Perliger, is, according to his own bio:

(T)he Director of Terrorism Studies at the Combating Terrorism Center and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His research focuses on political violence and extremism and the principal ways democracies respond to these challenges; the politics of security and the radical right in Israel, Europe and the US.

He is the author of four books and more than 20 articles and book chapters. His work has appeared in peer reviewed journals such as Social Forces, Security Studies, PS: Political Science, Criminal Justice and Behavior, Armed Forces and Society and others.

Dr. Perliger is the co-editor of the journal Democracy and Security and is a regular reviewer for Columbia University Press, Chicago University Press, Routledge, Polity Press, Political Psychology, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Terrorism and Political Violence, Armed Forces and Society and other journals.

And what, you may ask, is the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point?

Mission

Situated at the nexus of theory and practice, the Combating Terrorism Center serves as an important national resource that rigorously studies the terrorist threat and provides policy-relevant research while moving the boundaries of academic knowledge. The CTC’s distinguished scholars, international network of experts, and access to senior U.S. government leadership set it apart from any other like enterprise.

We Teach: As an institution, we embrace the unique responsibility to prepare cadets to think critically about the challenges they will face during war and peace. To this end, the Center directs multiple graduate-level seminars on Terrorism and Counterterrorism and administers a minor in terrorism studies. In addition, the CTC directs counterterrorism educational programs for four partner government agencies.

We Research: The CTC’s research program produces path-breaking analysis on the dynamic and evolving terrorist threat. The Center’s deep intellectual capital and ability to apply theory to practice creates a unique research model that not only informs strategic counterterrorism thinking but moves the boundaries of academic knowledge.

We Advise: Due to the Center’s unique position at the nexus of academia and practice, the Center leverages its deep expertise to contribute to discrete advisory efforts for federal, state, and local governments including: strategic analysis, operational support, and organizational strategy design.

Take a look at the CTC's personnel list. These are some serious folks.

Now, all of Perliger's previous research and experience has been in Israeli "right-wing extremism," see here, here, and here.

Apparently, however, Perliger is now branching out, into a subject about which he apparently knows exactly . . . dick. First evidence? Look at his sources listed on his website:

Predictably, under "Relevant links" lists The Southern Preposterous Lie Center and under "Datasets" lists SPLC's "Hate Incidents."

Also, given his sources listed at the end of the article in Note 2: Richard "Abens'" American Militias; Joel Dyer's Harvest of Rage; and Kathlyn Gay's Militias: Armed and Dangerous, it is not surprising that his paper reflects "The Narrative of 1995" critiqued by historian Prof. Robert H. Churchill in his book To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement.

Heck, this West Point "professor" schmuck didn't even get Richard Abanes name right. Here is what Prof. Churchill has to say about the quality of Abanes' and other "Brown Scare" writers of the 90s:

The militia movement has been the subject of at least a dozen books and hundreds of articles, yet it remains one of the most poorly understood political movements of the twentieth century. In the months after the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building by Timothy McVeigh, civil rights organizations issued at least a dozen published reports on the militia movement, and civil rights activists offered "expert" commentary in hundreds of news stories. Within a year, books by leading figures associated with civil rights organizations, including Morris Dees, Kenneth Stern, and Richard Abanes, offered a coherent narrative of the origin of the movement.

What America learned in these months was that the militia movement was an outgrowth of the racist Right. Civil rights activists portrayed the militias as the armed wing of a much larger "Christian Patriot" movement. They warned that Christian Patriots numbered in the millions and that Christian Patriotism called for restoration of white, Christian, patriarchal domination. The Christian Patriot movement as a whole, and the militias in particular, were antidemocratic, paranoid, virulently anti-semitic, genocidally racist, and brutally violent. Much of this literature suggested that Timothy McVeigh was the movement's highest expression. In this narrative, the militias and the Patriot movement took on the guise of the perfect racist "other," and the threat they posed was best articulated by Morris Dees' apocalyptic vision of a "gathering storm."

This "narrative of 1995" produced by civil rights organizations, coupled with the horror of the Oklahoma City bombing, triggered what Steven Chernak has referred to as a moral panic. Through published reports, their influence over the news coverage of the movement, and testimony at prominent public hearings, leading militia "experts" injected their portrait of the movement into public consciousness and popular culture. In news coverage, popular novels, episodes of Law and Order, and movies such as Arlington Road, the public became well-acquainted with the archetypal militiaman, usually protrayed as warped by racial hatred, obsessed with bizarre conspiracy theories, and hungry for violent retribution.

The moral panic over the "militia menace" strongly resembled previous moral panics over the "communist menace" that had swept the nation in the aftermath of World War I and again in the early 1950s. Less well known than these two Red scares is America's "Brown Scare." In the late 1930s, political activists on the left warned that an array of far right opponents of President Roosevelt and the New Deal . . . constituted a fifth column composed of fascist brownshirts . . . (T)he ensuing moral panic facilitated a campaign of repression waged by the U.S. governemnt against the Far Right during World War II. In 1995-6, the moral panic over the militia movement blossomed into a second American Brown Scare.

The literature produced by the second American Brown Scare has had significant impact on academic analysis of the movement, and this poses a problem for continuing scholarship. The civil rights organizations that produced the narrative of 1995 conceived of themselves as political opponents of the militia movement, and these organizations made the legal suppression of the movement one of their central political objectives. That political objective has systematically shaped their reporting on the movement. Their analyses might serve as a primary source base for an interesting analyis of how the activist Left perceived the Far Right at the turn of the millennium. To use this literature as a primary source base in an analysis of the character of the militia movement itself is to allow the movement's opponents to define it.

Unfortunately, much of the scholarship on the militia movement produced in the last ten years has not broken free from the influence of the narrative of 1995. Too many scholars have relied on the reports and books generated by the Brown Scare as primary evidence of the character of the movement. Others who have avoided this first error have nevertheless allowed the narrative of 1995 to unduly influence their research agendas. Finally, even the best scholarship on militias tends to inappropriately conflate the militia movement with other movements on the far right of American politics and to overstate the influence of millennial thought on militia ideology. . .

The final academic legacy of the Brown Scare is an emphasis on the allegedly close association of militia groups with other far right organizations, such as white supremacist groups, Christian Identity ministries, common-law courts, and tax protest societies. The narrative of 1995 lumped all of these disparate far right groups together in the "Christian Patriot movement," a misguided simplification that has led a number of senior scholars to blur the lines between different groups with quite different worldviews . . .

Since the turn of the millennium, three scholars have begun the task of freeing scholarship of the militia movement from the narrative of 1995. . . As an historian, I hope to contribute to this field an insight gained in the study of other partisan political crises in American history: in evaluating the ideology of an insurgent movement, one must not allow the movement's partisan allies, much less its partisan enemies, to speak for it. (pp. 7-11)

It is obvious that Perliger either hasn't read Churchill's work, or, if he has, he doesn't care to let it get in the way of his own narrative. Perliger presents his own "Typology of the American Violent Far Right."

Three major ideological trends can be identified within the American violent far right: racist, anti-federalist and fundamentalist. The ideological characteristics of the various groups impact their operations in terms of tactics used and target selection.

It is the relabeling of the older terms "militia" and "patriot movement" into the "Anti-Federalist Trend" which makes Perliger's faulty analysis particularly dangerous.

The anti-federalist trend (which is usually identified in the literature as the “militia” or “patriot” movement) appeared in full force only in the early to mid-1990s with the emergence of groups such as the Militia of Montana and the Michigan Militia. Anti-federalist and anti-government sentiments existed in U.S. society before the 1990s via diverse movements and ideological associations promoting anti-taxation, gun rights, and a “survivalist” lifestyle. Yet most scholars concur that the “farm crises” of the 1980s combined with the implications of rapid cultural, technological and normative changes in American society, as well as attempts to revise gun control and environmental legislation, facilitated the emergence of a fairly ideologically cohesive movement, as well as its rapid growth.[2]

Ideologically, anti-federalists are interested in undermining the influence, legitimacy and practical sovereignty of the federal government and its proxy organizations, such as the U.S. military or Federal Bureau of Investigation.[3] This rationale is multifaceted, and includes the belief that the U.S. political system and its proxies have been hijacked by external forces interested in promoting a New World Order (NWO),[4] in which the United States will be absorbed into the United Nations or another version of global government; strong convictions regarding the corrupted and tyrannical nature of the federal government and its related natural tendency to intrude on individuals’ civilian lives and constitutional rights; and finally, perceptions supporting civilian activism, individual freedoms, and self governing the way they were manifested in the frontier culture in U.S. history, especially during the Revolutionary War and the expansion to the American west. Hence, anti-federalist groups see themselves as part of a struggle to restore or preserve the United States’ “true” identity, values and “way of life” and as the successors of the country’s founding fathers.

Recent research conducted by this author shows that in the case of the anti-federalist trend there is compatibility between ideological tenets and operational characteristics. Two-thirds of the attacks by anti-federalist groups were directed against the government and its proxies, such as law enforcement (65.8%); while attacks against minorities (11%) and infrastructure (6.1%, which could also be seen as attacks against the government) comprise most of the rest.

The article doesn't given us the statistical evidence upon which Perliger rests his claims, but if he's counting on the Southern Preposterous Lie Center, that is a slender scholarly reed indeed.

The important point is that Perliger has managed, by describing these "violent right-wing extremists" as "anti-federalist", to expand, elide and conflate these perceived enemies and, I'm sure, to present to the cadets at West Point the specter of "constitutionalist terrorists."

This is dangerous stuff. It may also be argued that the neo-Nazis and "Christian" Identity types which make up the other two-thirds of Perliger's article, are not even "right wing" since their particular collectivisms derive from variants of socialism. The constitutional militias, as Churchill quickly recognized when he did his own original research, were largely libertarian in make up and natural enemies of all forms of collectivism.

As I commented back in 1999:

“I think in some ways Christian Identity is designed for pantywaists who are afraid to declare themselves true Nazis,” Vanderboegh jibed. “These are the folks who have to tell their mommas or their wives, “It’s OK that we hate blacks and Jews, dear, because God and Jesus told us it’s OK. Whereas the Nazis don’t worry about that kind of thing. They’re sort of beyond excuses.

“You know, when you’ve got Adolf Hitler as your standard-bearer, what else have you got to be embarrassed about?” Vanderboegh said.

“They each come to their pus-filled beliefs by different roads, but they agree on the destination.” -- “Christian Identity is for pantywaists” by Jeff Stein, Salon, 11 Aug 1999.

Yet, according to Perliger, we "anti-federalists" (and I surely acknowledge my Anti-Federalism, going back to Founders like George Mason and Patrick Henry) are now one of the "three trends of far right violence in the United States." AND THIS ILL-INFORMED SCHMUCK IS TEACHING WEST POINT CADETS.

Like I said, this is dangerous stuff.

George Mason, Anti-Federalist Terrorist?

You just took the Oath for the first time. NOW WHAT?

Be prepared to E.A.T. O.D.

Educate yourself. As a new member of the armed citizenry dedicated to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic you must raise your own level of martial knowledge and that of your friends and fellow patriots. A partial reading list:



1. Guidebook for Marines. http://www.usmcpress.com/guidebook.htm If you are able to buy just one book, get this one.

2. The Tiger's Way: A U.S. Private's Best Chance for Survival by H. John Poole. http://www.amazon.com/Tigers-Way-Privates-Chance-Survival/dp/0963869566

3. Light Infantry Tactics for Small Teams by Christopher E. Larson. http://www.amazon.com/Light-Infantry-Tactics-Small-Teams/dp/1418472077/ref=pd_sim_b_3

4. Six Ways In, Twelve Ways Out by the USROG. http://www.usrsog.org/manu.htm

Finish those, pass 'em around, and then dig into these nonfiction works:

Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose
Blackhawk Down by Mark Bowden
King's Mountain by Hank Messick
Paul Revere's Ride by David Hackett Fischer
Small Unit Leadership: A Common Sense Approach by Col. Dandridge M. Malone
The Battle for Hunger Hill by MG Daniel P. Bolger
The Minutemen by GEN John Galvin
To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face by Prof. Robert Churchill
Washington's Crossing by David Hackett Fischer
We Were Soldiers Once, and Young by Gen. Hal Moore

And these novels:

Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer
Rifleman Dodd by C.S. Forrester
Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
The Defence of Duffer's Drift by Lt. Backsight Forethought

2. Arm yourself. Rifle, handgun, shotgun -- in that order. Another necessary book:



Boston's Gun Bible by Boston T. Party.

Buy the best rifle you can afford that is in common caliber with your friends. Buy enough ammo to practice with it regularly until you attain proficiency. A $129 Moisin-Nagant in the hands of the man who has practiced with it is more effective that the $2000 semi-auto tack driver in the hands of someone who hasn't. If all you can buy is ammo, that's fine. Stock up on the caliber you'll be using until you're able to get a rifle. BUT DO NOT WAIT.

3. Train yourself, or find training.

Your first priority is fitness - physical training. Tough but imperative.

Your second priority is practical marksmanship. Places that teach it:

Appleseed.
http://www.appleseedinfo.org

Gabe Suarez. http://www.suarezinternationalstore.com

There are others local to you, no doubt. Beware the risk-averse training provided by some. We're not talking about the minutiae of concealed carry, but how to put an opponent down hard and fast. Ask questions before enrolling.

The third priority is military training -- how to shoot, move and communicate with your buddies. Here you're going to have to improvise. Find others willing to train with you. Start with buddy teams and then move up to fire teams. Then squads. Uncertain how to proceed? See some of the Praxis pieces (and their attendant comments) by The Trainer on this blog.

Organize yourself, your family and your friends. As above, build fire teams and squads. Assign duties to non-military persons, supply and so on. Establish caches for supply. Build communication networks. Reach out to like-minded law enforcement. How can you help them do their duty?

Defy. All the preps in the world are not worth a thing if you don't have the WILL to use them.

That's it. Sounds simple, but it is not. Organizing militia folk is like herding cats and chickens at the same time. It can be done, but not without extreme effort and massive headaches. That doesn't mean it can't be done, just that it is tough. Given the payoff at the end, why wouldn't it be?

Mike Vanderboegh
III

The SPLCization of Law Enforcement in the 21st Century: Conflation, moral panic and the "Narrative of 1995."

Southern "Poverty" Law Center headquarters, Montgomery, Alabama. The wages of deliberate conflation ain't penny ante.

"Conflation occurs when the identities of two or more individuals, concepts, or places, sharing some characteristics of one another, become confused until there seems to be only a single identity — the differences appear to become lost. In logic, the practice of treating two distinct concepts as if they were one does often produce error or misunderstanding — but not always — as a fusion of distinct subjects tends to obscure analysis of relationships which are emphasized by contrasts. The result of conflating concepts may give rise to fallacies of ambiguity . . . For example, the word "bat" has at least two meanings: a flying animal, and a piece of sporting equipment (such as a baseball bat or a cricket bat). If these two meanings are not distinguished, the result may be . . .:

All bats are animals.

Some wooden objects are bats.

Therefore, some wooden objects are animals." -- Wikipedia

The professional liars at the Southern Poverty Law Center are experts at conflation. You might say they've made quite a tidy pile of money at it. As you can see from the picture above of their shiny headquarters, there ain't much "poverty" about them. They have amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in their bank accounts selling conflation over the years.

Now this, on the face of it, is not uncommon, nor the way the law school-educated flacks at SPLC practice it, is it particularly illegal. That does not mean that it is not dangerous to the Republic or to the individuals and organizations that SPLC chooses to slander. For what we are witnessing today is the institutionalization of their conflation narrative from the highest levels of U.S. law enforcement all the way down to the cop on the beat. SPLC's deliberate twisting of facts and prejudice are now accepted as gospel and are ready, for one example, to be executed at the point of a Missouri highway patrolman's gun (the retraction of the grosser lies of the MIAC report notwithstanding).

If politics is the competition of narratives, then SPLC (and their sister canardists at the ADL) have, with the accession to power of the Obamanoids, swept the field.

The latest proof of this is in the nine page document that the Department of Homeland Security sent to police and sheriff's departments across the country on 7 April, entitled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment." This latest distillation of SPLC conflation from on high is being dissected and loudly protested by others, so I will not duplicate their efforts here.

What I would rather do is show you where this came from, in the words of a scholar who has studied the issue at length.



Meet Professor Robert H. Churchill, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. Professor Churchill is a historian of early America and specializes in the history of the American Revolution, early national political culture, and American political violence. Professor Churchill approached me a few years ago as part of research he was doing on a book, this book:



To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face has just been released by University of Michigan Press. You may find it on-line here. I received my copy only yesterday.

When Churchill approached me about his interest in the philosophical bases of the constitutional militia movement of the Nineties, I was wary. He was, after all, an academic, a species of human known to be not entirely without prejudices when it comes to militias. When I learned that he had been one of the debunkers of Michael Bellesiles' anti-firearm twisting of history with manufactured footnotes entitled "Arming America," I figured maybe he was intellectually honest enough for me to take a chance on.

Certainly the history of our movement had not yet been written. And even after skimming To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face, I must conclude that the comprehensive history I wish for has yet to be penned. Still, Churchill's work is as rigorous, honest and accurate a portrayal as anything I have seen. When I am quoted, I am quoted accurately and in context. There is not one error I have yet spotted, either in particular to me or in general. Churchill accurately identifies the various groups in and around the militia movement, pointing out the fundamental differences between the constitutionalists and the millennialists and certainly gets right our constant struggle against the racist collectivists who sought to turn the movement to their own purposes.

But in addition to the accuracy of his work, his is the first scholarly critique of the SPLC's conflationism and what Churchill calls the "moral panic" of the "Narrative of 1995." A longish, but pertinent, excerpt:

The militia movement has been the subject of at least a dozen books and hundreds of articles, yet it remains one of the most poorly understood political movements of the twentieth century. In the months after the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building by Timothy McVeigh, civil rights organizations issued at least a dozen published reports on the militia movement, and civil rights activists offered "expert" commentary in hundreds of news stories. Within a year, books by leading figures associated with civil rights organizations, including Morris Dees, Kenneth Stern, and Richard Abanes, offered a coherent narrative of the origin of the movement.

What America learned in these months was that the militia movement was an outgrowth of the racist Right. Civil rights activists portrayed the militias as the armed wing of a much larger "Christian Patriot" movement. They warned that Christian Patriots numbered in the millions and that Christian Patriotism called for restoration of white, Christian, patriarchal domination. The Christian Patriot movement as a whole, and the militias in particular, were antidemocratic, paranoid, virulently anti-semitic, genocidally racist, and brutally violent. Much of this literature suggested that Timothy McVeigh was the movement's highest expression. In this narrative, the militias and the Patriot movement took on the guise of the perfect racist "other," and the threat they posed was best articulated by Morris Dees' apocalyptic vision of a "gathering storm."

This "narrative of 1995" produced by civil rights organizations, coupled with the horror of the Oklahoma City bombing, triggered what Steven Chernak has referred to as a moral panic. Through published reports, their influence over the news coverage of the movement, and testimony at prominent public hearings, leading militia "experts" injected their portrait of the movement into public consciousness and popular culture. In news coverage, popular novels, episodes of Law and Order, and movies such as Arlington Road, the public became well-acquainted with the archetypal militiaman, usually protrayed as warped by racial hatred, obsessed with bizarre conspiracy theories, and hungry for violent retribution.

The moral panic over the "militia menace" strongly resembled previous moral panics over the "communist menace" that had swept the nation in the aftermath of World War I and again in the early 1950s. Less well known than these two Red scares is America's "Brown Scare." In the late 1930s, political activists on the left warned that an array of far right opponents of President Roosevelt and the New Deal . . . constituted a fifth column composed of fascist brownshirts . . . (T)he ensuing moral panic facilitated a campaign of repression waged by the U.S. governemnt against the Far Right during World War II. In 1995-6, the moral panic over the militia movement blossomed into a second American Brown Scare.

The literature produced by the second American Brown Scare has had significant impact on academic analysis of the movement, and this poses a problem for continuing scholarship. The civil rights organizations that produced the narrative of 1995 conceived of themselves as political opponents of the militia movement, and these organizations made the legal suppression of the movement one of their central political objectives. That political objective has systematically shaped their reporting on the movement. Their analyses might serve as a primary source base for an interesting analyis of how the activist Left perceived the Far Right at the turn of the millennium. To use this literature as a primary source base in an analysis of the character of the militia movement itself is to allow the movement's opponents to define it.

Unfortunately, much of the scholarship on the militia movement produced in the last ten years has not broken free from the influence of the narrative of 1995. Too many scholars have relied on the reports and books generated by the Brown Scare as primary evidence of the character of the movement. Others who have avoided this first error have nevertheless allowed the narrative of 1995 to unduly influence their research agendas. Finally, even the best scholarship on militias tends to inappropriately conflate the militia movement with other movements on the far right of American politics and to overstate the influence of millennial thought on militia ideology. . .

The final academic legacy of the Brown Scare is an emphasis on the allegedly close association of militia groups with other far right organizations, such as white supremacist groups, Christian Identity ministries, common-law courts, and tax protest societies. The narrative of 1995 lumped all of these disparate far right groups together in the "Christian Patriot movement," a misguided simplification that has led a number of senior scholars to blur the lines between different groups with quite different worldviews . . .

Since the turn of the millennium, three scholars have begun the task of freeing scholarship of the militia movement from the narrative of 1995. . . As an historian, I hope to contribute to this field an insight gained in the study of other partisan political crises in Ameerican history: in evaluating the ideology of an insurgent movement, one must not allow the movement's partisan allies, much less its partisan enemies, to speak for it. (pp. 7-11)

Indeed. And as important as this principle is in historical scholarship, it is even more vitally important, even deadly important, that such bias not enter into the decision making loop of law enforcement. Yet this is exactly where we are today.

But, you may ask, how do you know that SPLC is writing these MIAC and DHS reports? Why because they have told us. From the Washington Times story yesterday by Audrey Hudson and Eli Lake, "Federal agency warns of radicals on right":

Mark Potok, director of the (SPLC's) intelligence project, said the Homeland Security report, "confirms that white supremacists are interested in the military. There is some concern, and there should be, about returning veterans, one need only think of the example of Timothy McVeigh, who was in the first Iraq war."

Mr. Potok added that he was generally pleased with the report. "Basically, the report tracks fairly closely with what we have been saying for some time now. They mention us a couple of times, though not by name," he said.

Yes, well, isn't that special? The moral panic whipped up by the Narrative of 1995 has now been embraced by the federal government and by many state law enforcement organizations and will guide their decisions in the coming months and years. People can, and have been, killed needlessly over such lies and stupidities.

My suggestion? Arm yourselves with the truth. Buy a copy of Prof. Churchill's book. And after you are done reading it, donate it to your local sheriff or state "fusion center." If left unchallenged, the "Narrative of 1995" could get us all killed.

Mike Vanderboegh
Pinson, AL