militia movement

militia movement, in the United States, movement of private, generally right-wing paramilitary organizations whose members characteristically accept highly conspiratorial interpretations of politics and view themselves as defenders of traditional freedoms against government oppression.

Under federal and state laws, a militia is defined as that population of able-bodied citizens between certain ages (e.g., 17 to 45; see 10 U.S. Code §246) who may be called into service by the federal government or a state government in times of emergency. There are two general classes of militias: “organized” militias, which include members of the U.S. National Guard and members of state national guards or other state-established military units, and “unorganized” militias, consisting of all other members of the federal militia or a state militia, understood as the relevant population of able-bodied citizens. Although paramilitary organizations in the United States are not militias in the legal sense of that term, they are conventionally referred to as such by journalists, politicians, and law-enforcement agencies. The remainder of this article will refer to them as private militias.

Almost all states (48) have constitutional provisions requiring the military to be subordinate to civil authority; more than half (29) have laws that effectively prohibit the formation of private militias (most of those laws also prohibit public parading or drilling with firearms); and half (25) have laws that prohibit paramilitary activities such as training others in the use of lethal weapons that will be used to further a civil disturbance. Such constitutional provisions and laws are rarely enforced, however.

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Private militias are by no means a new phenomenon in the United States. Historical parallels include the network of fascist and “shirt” movements in the mid-1930s and the well-armed rightist Minutemen (named after the minutemen of the American Revolutionary War) of the early 1960s. New private militias were founded in the late 1970s and flourished despite state laws then in force that prohibited their existence or activities. Some of these groups espoused fascist or racist (e.g., anti-Semitic or white-supremacist) views—such as the belief that the United States is ruled by a Jewish-dominated tyrannical Zionist Occupational Government (the “ZOG”)—and promoted neo-Nazi literature, such as William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries (1978; published under Pierce’s pseudonym, Andrew Macdonald), a fictional account of how a militant anti-Semitic group uses violence to achieve world dominance. During the presidency of Donald J. Trump (2017–21), many private militias embraced the amorphous QAnon conspiracy theory, which alleged, among other things, that the world is ruled by an international cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibals, pedophiles, and child murderers.

Some private militias also accepted the eccentric constitutional doctrines of the Common Law movement, which denied the authority of all governmental institutions above the level of the county. Even the militia movement’s least-committed members tended to believe that the United States government undermines American liberties, in part through its acquiescence in an international totalitarian regime, the so-called New World Order. Government oppression, they argued, manifests itself in the imposition of income taxes, gun control legislation, and environmental restrictions on private property, especially in the western United States.

In the 1980s the militia movement conceived of the American public as an “unorganized militia” that would supplement both the national armed forces and the national guard of each state. As new private militias trained and armed themselves, however, they increasingly adopted overtly antigovernment policies. During the 1980s increasing numbers of people were attracted to survivalism, a movement that advocated a retreat to self-sufficient and well-armed rural settlements in anticipation of a general breakdown of society. Survivalists often warned of the imminent collapse of the United States as a result of nuclear attack.

Subsequently, various antigovernment factions, including survivalists, members of the Common Law movement, white supremacists, and armed opponents of taxes and abortion, coalesced in the “Patriot movement,” which may well have attracted millions of sympathizers. Supporters of the Patriot movement were able to disseminate and discuss their ideas widely and cheaply through the Internet, which became accessible to the general public in the early 1990s and later encompassed popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

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Various tragic and widely publicized events during this period served to galvanize the Patriot movement and its burgeoning private militias. In 1992, at Ruby Ridge, the Idaho property of white separatist Randy Weaver, Weaver’s wife and son were killed during a controversial standoff with law enforcement agents. In the following year, the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, was raided by federal agents; following a protracted standoff, during which agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) attempted to enter the building, some 80 members of the group died in a fire. From the perspective of the militia movement, both events demonstrated the federal government’s persecution and killing of dissidents. The private militias subsequently attracted legions of supporters, especially in Western states but also in some Midwestern states, notably Michigan. At its peak in the mid-1990s, the Northern Michigan Regional Militia claimed more than 1,000 committed members and thousands more sympathizers. By that time the ranks of the nationwide militia movement had swelled to about 40,000 members among some 900 groups (some claims put the number of members at more than 250,000).

The movement reached a turning point in 1995 when Timothy McVeigh, a supporter of the militia movement’s ideals, exploded a massive homemade bomb at a federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, killing 168 people. (The date had been chosen to commemorate the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775 in the American Revolution and the fiery end of the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in 1993.) McVeigh and his associates had been connected with private militias in Michigan and elsewhere, and, although no such organization was specifically linked to the crime, there was a widespread impression that the bombing was the logical outcome of the kind of antigovernment paranoia the militia movement fomented. Public revulsion and a government crackdown had greatly reduced the size and influence of the militia movement by the beginning of the 21st century.

Following a period of relative dormancy, the militia movement was revived by the election in 2008 of Barack Obama, a Democrat, as the country’s first African American president. In 2009 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported to law-enforcement agencies that right-wing militias and white-supremacist groups in the United States were winning new recruits, some of whom were active or former members of the U.S. military, by stoking fears of gun control and expanded welfare rolls and by exploiting resentment created by the severe economic recession (the Great Recession) that began in late 2007. The report also warned that “lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent rightwing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States.” The DHS study was immediately condemned by Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits as left-wing propaganda by the Obama administration. Facing intense political pressure, the DHS eventually withdrew the report and disbanded the unit that had produced it.

Beginning in 2007–08 the number of active private militias in the United States increased significantly, from about 40 to a peak of well over 300 in 2010 and 2011, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit organization that monitors hate groups and other extremist organizations. This period was also marked by the founding of certain large umbrella groups of private militias, including the Three Percenters (2008), the Oath Keepers (2009), and the Constitutional Sheriffs (c. 2010). After 2011 the number of private militias fluctuated, increasing to more than 250 in 2014–15 and 2016–17 and steadily declining thereafter to about 170 in 2020.

The American militia movement reached another turning point during the campaign (2015–16) and presidency (2017–21) of Republican Donald J. Trump. Despite the movement’s ingrained opposition to the federal and state governments, many private-militia members viewed Trump as a sympathetic ally who was worthy of their support. Their change of heart was due to a number of factors, including Trump’s efforts to drastically reduce immigration by Latin Americans and Muslims, his racist comments regarding non-European immigrant and minority groups, his reluctance to disavow the support of right-wing extremists and white supremacists or to condemn violent acts committed by those groups, and his endorsement of various right-wing conspiracy theories, including the “birther” theory that Obama was not a natural-born U.S. citizen. Much of the militia movement, then, directed its hostility away from the federal government and toward liberal and left-wing groups, particularly civil rights organizations. From 2017, members of private militias regularly attended protests against police brutality by the Black Lives Matter movement and other civil rights activists, ostensibly to protect private property and to confront supposed anarchists and members of “antifa” (an abbreviation of antifascist), a loose association of generally left-wing activists who aggressively, and sometimes violently, opposed groups they viewed as fascist, racist, or right-wing extremist. In August 2017 several private militia members attended a notorious rally of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, where antifa counter-protesters were also present. Private militias also appeared as unauthorized monitors at anti-Trump protests and as unauthorized security forces at pro-Trump rallies, and they were a noticeable presence at so-called “Second Amendment” demonstrations against proposed gun-control measures in several states. From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, private militias joined other right-wing activists in protests against lockdowns, mask wearing, and other public-safety measures eventually imposed in almost all states—measures those activists viewed as egregious violations of personal liberty and as evidence or omens of tyrannical government in the United States.

After Trump lost his bid for reelection in 2020 to the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, private militia members and other Trump supporters accepted and amplified Trump’s false claim that Biden had won only because Democrats in key swing states had committed massive voter fraud. Later, on January 6, 2021, private militia members and other right-wing extremists mounted a violent assault on the United States Capitol in a failed attempt to prevent Congress from formally certifying Biden’s victory.