THE PATRIOT MOVEMENT: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
Brian Levin
INTRODUCTION
America’s Patriot antigovernment movement, barely noticed before the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, represents the greatest threat of domestic terrorism to the United States at the end of the twentieth century. Assessing the threat from this movement, however, is in many ways an easier task than describing exactly what it is. The Patriot antigovernment movement represents a newly formed broad coalition of previously autonomous and loosely related social and political ideologies. Its component ideologies represent a wide spectrum internally regarding goals, methods and leadership. The ideological range is expansive: including wholly non-violent fundamentalists and libertarians on the more moderate end of the scale, all the way to a small, but influential, number of white supremacists and Constitutionalists1 on the other end, who believe that America exists for white Christians only.2 Methods too, can range quite dramatically from mainstream legal challenges, lobbying, and rambling political diatribes all the way to fraud, intimidation and terrorism. This article will analyze the terrorist threat of the Patriot antigovernment movement by examining both the historical factors that have led to its creation as well as its present day characteristics.
Modern Patriot extremism fits neatly into established terrorist typology. Patriot offenders fall into at least one of these three main types of terrorists:
Ideologically Motivated
Beliefs
Citizenship
Psychologically Dangerous
Sociopath
Mentally unstable
Personal Benefit or Revenge
Benefit
Revenge
While the Patriot movement is a recent phenomenon, its component parts are hardly new at all. Paramilitarism, fundamentalism, tax protestation, anti-Semitism, white supremacy, nullification initiatives, gun rights, cults, libertarianism, conspiracy theories and isolationism have been recurrent political and social forces that have impacted American history. It is not the component ideological parts of this movement that are new, but rather their relationship to one another. An understanding of how and why this relationship was forged is essential to analyzing not only the threat of the Patriot movement, but its evolution as well.
HISTORICAL ROOTS OF RESISTANCE TO FEDERAL AUTHORITY
The extent of federal authority during the early history of the United States had been the subject of both political debate as well as factional violence. The formation of the nation itself and ratification of the Constitution involved a careful, yet somewhat imperfect balancing, of state and federal power. In fact, the Constitution’s Bill of Rights when first enacted in 1791 restricted only the hands of the federal government and not the states from interfering with various enumerated rights. This leads many commentators to observe that the goals behind the Bill of Rights were as much to restrict federal authority, than they were to protect the exercise of fundamental rights, since individual states still had significant latitude to interfere with civil liberties.
EARLY REBELLION
This country’s long history of renegade antigovernment paramilitary organizations extends back to the post revolutionary period. In 1786, the first major challenge to federal authority occurred when dispossessed and disenfranchised poor Massachusetts farmers launched Shay’s Rebellion against Commonwealth Courts and a federal military arsenal. The factional violence fueled support at the Constitutional Convention for a strong centralized federal government proficient at preventing such insurrections.
In 1794, another group of armed farmers launched the Whiskey Rebellion in protest over a new 30 percent tax on whiskey, a popular commodity. These militant rural Pennsylvania farmers threatened federal tax collectors, U.S. Marshals and those farmers in compliance with the new tax. After Pennsylvania, Governor Thomas Mifflin refused to end the intimidation of federal agents and citizens in the Commonwealth, President Washington and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton convinced the governors of adjacent states to call out 15,000 militia troops and the rebellion promptly ended without further violence (Whiskey Rebels, 1975, p. 1232).
NULLIFICATION POLITICS AND KLAN EXTREMISM
The Nullification Doctrine, a political concept that dates back to 1798, is embraced in altered form by modern day Patriots. The doctrine incorrectly contends that states can void repugnant federal laws within their jurisdiction. Today’s Patriots and Constitutionalists believe this "right" of nullification extends beyond the states to individual "sovereign" citizens as well. For instance, Michigan militia leader Norman Olson (1997) contends, " No man-made law can abolish the citizen militia since such a law would be in fact an unlawful act designed to dissolve the power vested in the people" (p. 13).
In 1798, Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson and Kentucky’s James Madison introduced the Nullification Doctrine to America by drafting state resolutions designed to void the sweeping Alien and Sedition Acts, which punished not only antigovernment plots, but defamatory criticism and dissent against government officials as well. The unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts were in large part repealed two years later when a Jeffersonian political victory threw the federalists out of office. Nullification would continue to be an influential political doctrine in nineteenth century America, peaking, but not ending, with the Civil War (Nullification Doctrine, 1975, p. 813).
After the Civil War, antigovernment backlash in the South against the Union victory and Reconstruction era federal civil rights laws ranged from the political to the terroristic. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), the nation’s largest and most enduring terrorist group, founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 waged a violent campaign against newly freed black slaves who exercised their rights and the whites who supported Reconstruction (Chalmers, 1981).
A companion political and legislative backlash against federal authority also took place during the post Civil War years. State Jim Crow laws and Black Codes perpetuated the oppression and segregation of blacks, while the Posse Comitatus Act generally restricted the use of military troops from enforcing federal authority against civilians, as had been the case during Reconstruction. Federal courts also became ensnared in the political backlash against federalism by abandoning interpretations of federal laws that would limit the power of individual states and protect minorities (Jim Crow Laws, 1975, p. 579; Levitas, 1996).
While many political leaders were distrustful of the reach of federal power, they were also fearful of violence perpetrated by organized armed extremists. Legislation in the later half of the nineteenth century was enacted to address the threat posed by renegade private armies and terrorist groups. In 1886, the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the right of the states to ban unauthorized paramilitary training and military organizing (Presser v. Illinois, 1886).
Today, over 100 years later, in addition to a federal ban on paramilitary training, 41 states have laws banning private armies or paramilitary training (Halpern & Levin, 1996, pp. 133-134; Civil Disobedience Act, 1968). Outrage over Klan atrocities led to the passage of the Federal KKK Acts, laws that are still used today to punish violent deprivations of civil rights. The Klan’s influence ensnared the whole South and its membership soared to over 500,000 before it was "officially" disbanded in 1869 by its founder, a former Confederate general, Nathan Bedford Forrest (Chambers, 1981).
The Klan’s second incarnation came in 1915. A Georgia preacher named William Simmons broadened the scope of Klan bigotry to also include Catholics, Jews, and new immigrants, in addition to African-Americans. He also sculpted Klan ideology to embrace Christian fundamentalism and fanatical patriotism-trends that are present today in the ideological framework of the Patriot movement. A new technological medium, the motion picture, broadcast a glorified and heroic Klan image to the nation in the popular D.W. Griffith film, Birth of a Nation. By the mid 1920s, the Klan had 4.5 million members throughout the East, with a disproportionate representation in Indiana. Lynchings committed or inspired by the Klan were a common terror tool in the South. Thousands of mostly black Americans were murdered by Klansmen or their sympathizers over the span of several decades. Before being coopted by racists, lynching had previously emerged as a punishment of choice by frontier vigilantes from the revolutionary era into the late 1800s (Bullard, 1991, pp. 14-18; Ridgeway, 1995, p. 52; KKK, 1975, p. 61; Lynching, 1975, p. 668-669).
By 1925, internal quarrels, corruption and highly publicized sex scandals led to a steep decline in Klan influence and membership until a revival during the Civil Rights era (Bullard, 1991, pp. 14-18; KKK, 1975, p. 619). While the Klan today, with only 5,000 members nationally, is a mere shadow of its former self, Klan methods and ideology have played a key role in the evolution of antigovernment politics and paramilitary extremism.
THE SILVER SHIRTS
Another influential extremist organization that aided in the development of armed antigovernment paramilitarism in the United States was the fascist Silver Shirts of the 1930s. The Silver Shirts were the American analogue to Hitler’s Brown Shirts and their proclaimed goal was to further the "work of Christ militant in the open." Many key paramilitary and white supremacist leaders of the post World War II era were members or associates of the Silver Shirts. These same leaders would later play a crucial role in fomenting conspiracy theories and bigotry as a mainstay of far right paramilitary extremism for decades to come. The Silver Shirts were led by William Pelley, a conspiracist, Hitler fanatic and virulent anti-Semite, who had accused Herbert Hoover of being a puppet of international Jewish bankers who had crafted the Great Depression. The Silver Shirts peaked in the mid-thirties with about 15,000 members, but the advent of World War II and several high profile espionage convictions resulted in the organization’s dissolution (Ridgeway, 1995, pp. 62-64).
While the Silver Shirt’s existence was short lived, its influence on right wing American paramilitary extremism extends to the present day. Henry Beach, who decades later founded the racist anti-tax Posse Comitatus movement, was a Silver Shirt. Another prominent Silver Shirt racist, Gerald K. Smith, is considered a patriarch to succeeding generations of right-wing racist extremists. A Christian minister turned anti-Semitic populist, Smith was a close advisor to another controversial populist, Louisiana Senator Huey Long, whose rising political career abruptly ended in assassination in 1935. Smith, like Pelley, railed against the threat of an international Jewish conspiracy for most of his life. Anti-Semitic scapegoating was a popular tool for many extreme right-wing demagogues who sought to exploit fear of jazz era decadence, the Depression, communism, capitalism, immigration, the perceived decline of morality, and international conflict. The most prominent mainstream purveyors of anti-Semitic conspiracies in the 1920s and 1930s were popular radio personality Father Charles Coughlin and industrialist Henry Ford, who published and disseminated anti-Semitic tirades in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, and in the republished The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Ridgeway, 1995, pp. 55-62, 66). While thoroughly discredited as a fraud, the Protocols are still circulated today within the Patriot movement as a genuine secret document outlining a Jewish conspiracy to control of the world.
THE RACIST RELIGION OF CHRISTIAN IDENTITY
An associate of Smith, Wesley Swift is a religious patriarch to many modern day militias and white supremacists alike. After World War II, Swift served as an ordained minister in an evolving new and virulent racist religious movement called the Church of Jesus Christ Christian or Christian Identity. One Swift follower and Identity adherent was Silver Shirt alumnus Richard Butler, now the aging patriarch of Aryan Nations, one of America’s most influential neo-Nazi hate groups. William Potter Gale was another follower of Swift and his bigoted Identity theology (Ridgeway, 1995, p. 33). Gale, who died in 1988, founded the violent anti-Communist California Rangers militia in the 1960s and was a chief architect of the modern Posse Comitatus movement--the forerunner of today’s antigovernment freemen and common law court movement. In 1987, Gale was convicted for his part in a plan to assassinate a federal judge and Nevada IRS officials.
Identity’s racism and anti-Semitism are eerily reminiscent of the mainstream bigotry present in many Christian denominations of years past. The well spring of this bigotry, however, is much newer and far more peculiar. Christian Identity is the progeny of British Israelism, a nineteenth century belief that contends white Christians are the real Israelites. Under Identity theology, Jews are the spawn of Satan and people of color are subhuman "mud people," the product of a faulty first creation. American Identity liturgy preaches that America is a divinely bestowed white Christian homeland to be won in an apocalyptic battle against the Jewish dominated U.S. government, race traitors and minorities. Today, Identity adherents and other white supremacists refer to the U.S. Government as the Zionist Occupational Government (Z.O.G.). After the great millennial end battle, believers contend, the second coming of Christ will take place.
In many ways, Swift’s racist Christian Identity theology mimics mainstream ultra-conservative fundamentalist Christian religions. Identity theology is intensely scriptural and distrustful of many of the values accepted in the more progressive mainstream society.
The cloak of traditional fundamentalism made Christian Identity an easy theology for conservative Christian racists to embrace. With varying degrees of speed and intensity mainstream conservative American religions by the end of the twentieth century had rejected their previous positions of silence or support regarding racial supremacy. Civil rights era violence and the eloquence of Dr. Martin Luther King and his progeny steered mainstream Christianity into a role that increasingly valued tolerance and equality. The Christian denominations of yesteryear which justified both slavery and segregation no longer existed for the modern racist fundamentalist, making Identity a natural theological refuge.
. Identity’s fundamentalist traditions, decentralized structure, survivalist tendencies and virulent distrust of the government enable the sect to recruit some ultra-conservative disenfranchised whites into its web of racial hatred and anti-Semitism. Identity not only provides a structured theological framework for virulent hatred and scapegoating against selected enemies but a Biblical justification of violence against these enemies.
THE POSSE COMITATUS MOVEMENT
In addition to Identity, another building block of the modern Patriot tradition is the Posse Comitatus movement. Posse Comitatus is Latin for "power of the county" and the tradition dates back to medieval England, where the local sheriff enlisted residents to enforce laws against criminals and critics of the crown (Levitas, 1996). In this country, posses were sometimes called upon by law enforcement to apprehend criminals on the Western frontier. The modern Posse Comitatus was formed by ex-Silver Shirt Henry Beach in Portland, Oregon, in 1969 (Ridgeway, 1995, p.129). Just as Christian Identity established a biblical religious structure for the amorphous antigovernment and bigoted beliefs of "sovereign white Christians," the Posse Comitatus did the same in the legal and political arena. In much the same fashion that Identity interprets the Bible, the Posse movement embraced simple contorted fundamentalist beliefs about the Constitution. It rejects the notion of America’s monetary system, the income tax, the judicial system, the federal reserve, civil rights for minorities, most post Civil War constitutional amendments, as well as state and federal authority over residents. The Posse Comitatus movement refers to whites as independent "sovereign citizens" who need not comply with most modern legislation, particularly taxes (Ridgeway, 1995, pp. 129-138).
During the 1970s and 1980s Posse Comitatus membership extended throughout the nation with a concentration in the west, plains states, south-central United States and Wisconsin. Like their Patriot progeny of the 1990s, the Posse issued threatening edicts against government officials, disseminated counterfeit checks and cash, stockpiled weapons, conducted paramilitary training, murdered law enforcement officers, and established their own "sovereign" courts and communities. In 1975, Posse extremists even formed a conspiracy to assassinate Vice President Nelson Rockefeller (Ridgeway, 1995, p. 133). Posse membership benefited from mainstream conservatism, anti-tax sentiment, racial polarization, distrust of government, aggressive marketing techniques, the farm crisis, and strategic alliances with parallel racist movements.
The folk hero and martyr of the Posse Comitatus movement is Gordon Kahl, a grandfatherly looking North Dakotan and World War II veteran. In 1983, the 63 year-old Kahl killed two U.S. Marshals and injured three others when they tried to arrest him for violating his probation on a previous tax evasion conviction. Several months later Kahl himself was killed in a pitched fire fight with lawmen in rural Arkansas, that also left a local sheriff dead (Corcoran, 1990).
One Freemen style autonomous "sovereign" community, Tigerton Dells, Wisconsin, flourished briefly before getting broken up by authorities in the mid-1980s. Tigerton Dells was presided over by Identity minister James Wickstrom, a convicted felon and former associate of William Potter Gale who now operates the influential "American Patriot Fax Network."
THE MODERN KU KLUX KLAN
During the late 1970s and the 1980s Klansmen relied on two distinct strategies to promote their cause. Both these strategies have since emerged in the modern Patriot movement. One strategy, that of mainstreaming racism, was pioneered by David Duke. Duke left the Klan and started his own group, the National Association for the Advancement of White People. Duke’s strategy was to mainstream and subtly disguise his bigotry by exploiting racial divisions less directly than the more confrontational KKK style. He wore suits and submerged his racial views into mainstream political discussions of affirmative action, crime, drugs, federal authority, welfare, gay rights and education. Duke was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives, and was narrowly defeated in bids for governor and the U.S. Senate in the late 1980s. In 1988 and 1992, Duke unsuccessfully ran for President on the Populist Party ticket (Schwartz, 1996, p. 36-38). Bo Gritz, a Green Beret Vietnam War veteran, and popular Patriot style survivalist was briefly the Populist Party’s vice presidential nominee. In 1992, Gritz advocated the establishment of armed civilian militias during his own Populist Party presidential candidacy (Stern, 1996, p. 36).
While Duke’s political performance was often disquieting, it never resulted in his ascension to any high political office. Nevertheless, Duke’s influence and knowledge of American politics is evidenced by the increasing prevalence of the race baiting present in other more successful mainstream political initiatives such as President Bush’s Willie Horton ads, the racially polarizing reelection practices of North Carolina’s Senator Jesse Helms, and the success of anti-immigrant and anti-affirmative action referendums in California. Like Duke, today’s Patriot movement also has a less shrill nonviolent political side that seeks to elect officials and influence legislation by exploiting general discontent.
The other Klan strategy was more violent and extreme. The Klan could no longer count on the mainstream membership and political support that sustained it in the South during the turbulent Civil Rights Era. During the 1980s many Klan factions adopted not only a disturbing new violent and militaristic style, but an increasing solidarity with other hatemongers they previously distrusted, notably neo-Nazis. During the 1980s in North Carolina and Texas, Klan paramilitary units terrorized minorities with impunity until federal courts enjoined them. In the late 1970s and 1980s Klansmen and their associates committed numerous murders, bombings and other violent attacks on minorities, eerily reminiscent of the Klan’s previous waves of terror. While the Klan’s violent shift and militaristic style increased membership off its early 1970s lows, to about 11,000 in 1981, there was an unintended consequence (Klanwatch, 1990, p. 47). Prominent watchdog groups like Klanwatch, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Center for Democratic Renewal engaged in a variety of successful strategies against the Klan and other organized hate groups that included monitoring, grass roots activism, legislative initiatives and civil law suits. The Klan and other hate groups suffered a series of crushing legal blows for their connections to acts of hate violence in cases litigated by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). These losses resulted in the imprisonment of many racist leaders and the crippling of several prominent violent hate groups including Alabama’s United Klans of America, California’s White Aryan Resistance, the Invisible Knights of the KKK, the Church of the Creator, the Arizona Patriots, and Arkansas’ Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord (CSA) militia.
One of the most influential Klan leaders of the 1980s was Louis Beam, a Vietnam Veteran and former Grand Dragon in David Duke’s Texas Knights of the KKK, who pioneered the concept of Klan militia with the formation of the Texas Emergency Reserve (TER). In the early 1980s, the TER terrorized refugee Vietnamese fishermen in Galveston Bay until a federal court enjoined their activities as a result of a lawsuit brought by the SPLC (Vietnamese Fishermen’s Association v. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, 1982). A subsequent lawsuit against Steven Miller’s Confederate Knights of the KKK enjoined paramilitary activities and the intimidation of black citizens in North Carolina (Person v. Miller, 1988).
ARYAN MILITANCY
In 1981, Beam joined ex-Silver Shirt Richard Butler’s Hayden Lake, Idaho, based Aryan Nations, an influential neo-Nazi Identity group. Beam was and continues to be a trendsetter in the antigovernment hate movement. He pioneered many of the methods used by the Patriot movement today: modern paramilitary organizing, extremist computer networks, closer ties between Klansmen and Nazis and the strategy of an antigovernment guerrilla insurgency against public officials and minorities.
An Aryan Nations offshoot group, The Order, launched just the kind of insurgency envisioned by Louis Beam. In 1983 and 1984, the group committed murders, numerous armed robberies netting over four million dollars, and other felonies as part of their plot to assassinate civic leaders and to foment an antigovernment race war. Most of the stolen money has never been recovered and is believed to have been distributed to a variety of prominent hate groups. In 1984, Order founder Robert Jay Mathews stated, "A secret war has been developing for the last year between the regime in Washington and an ever growing number of white people who are determined to regain what our forefathers ... died for" (Bullard, 1989, p. 15). Later that year Mathews was killed in a fire following a ferocious gun battle with FBI agents in Whidbey Island, Washington. The remaining members were convicted on federal charges and are still considered "Prisoners of War" by the extremist right (Bullard, 1989, p. 16).
The Order’s name and methods were based on a popular 1978 racist novel, The Turner Diaries, authored under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald by another influential neo-Nazi, William Pierce. Pierce, a former college physics professor, presides over the West Virginia based National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group that now actively advocates militia organizing by white supremacists (False Patriots, 1996, p. 37; Macdonald, 1978).
The Turner Diaries is influential to the ideology of the antigovernment hate movement. Like Posse Comitatus and Christian Identity, the novel galvanizes bigotry and antigovernment sentiment into a simple, cohesive and accessible message. Moreover, its glorification of violent guerrilla attacks by small committed bands of racist warriors is considered not only inspirational, but instructional within the world of far right extremists.
The Turner Diaries racist folklore of random acts of violence directed against one’s enemies had a profound effect on unaffiliated hatemongers such as racist Skinheads, who also embrace the book. While the vast majority of hate crimes are not committed by hard-core hatemongers, a disproportionate number of bias motivated homicides are committed by Skinheads. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, neo-Nazi Skinheads were the single most common identifiable cause of bias related homicides in the United States (see, for example, SPLC, 1994, pp. 17-18; SPLC, 1995a, pp. 14-15; SPLC, 1996, p. 7). According to a recent ADL (1993) study, Skinheads committed dozens of bias homicides over a period of several years.
By the end of the 1980s, the world of organized hate and right-wing extremism was down, but not quite out. While these groups had committed more violent acts of domestic terrorism than any other ideological category of terrorists during the 1980s, they were also the focus of a relentless string of prosecutions and civil suits. One of the few notable prosecutorial losses came in 1988 when Louis Beam, Richard Butler and almost a dozen others were acquitted on sedition and other charges by a federal jury in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The indictment alleged a plot to "overthrow, put down and destroy by force the government of the United States and work for a new Aryan Nation" through the bombing of federal buildings and sabotage of infrastructure targets (Dees with Corcoron, 1996, pp. 41, 43-44).
In a post acquittal interview, Klan defendant Robert Miles summed up the state of right-wing extremism this way, " Who Knows? What movement? What’s left of it?"; while Beam proclaimed himself a "Seditionist" ready to continue his fight against the government "till we get our country back" (Dees with Corcoron, 1996, p. 44).
THE GENESIS OF THE PATRIOT MOVEMENT
By the early 1990s, far right-wing extremism was at a crossroads. Previously popular centralized group structures made extremist organizations susceptible not only to infiltration by authorities, but also to civil and criminal liability for the conduct of their associates. A traditional mainstay enemy, international Jewish inspired communism became an anachronism with the recent downfall of the Soviet Union. In addition, displays of overt bigotry limited the racist far right’s ability to recruit from a broad pool of potential members.
Social surveys indicated broad discontent and insecurity among the general public concerning economic shifts, taxes, crime, and a bloated and inequitable federal bureaucracy (Levin, 1993). Furthermore, Americans no longer trusted or felt connected to the institutions that they relied upon in the past to provide them with common goals and an identity. According to annual opinion polls, from 1974 to 1994 the percentage of Americans expressing a great deal of confidence in various institutions decline drastically. For example, those reporting a great deal of confidence in the White House declined from 28% to 18%, in the U.S. Supreme Court from 40% to 31%, and confidence in Congress declined from 18% to 8%. Similar declines were evidenced in organized religion, the press, corporations, universities, and traditional medicine. In addition, 83% of Americans felt government regulations manifested a threat to their rights and freedoms (U.S. Department of Justice, 1995, pp. 144-145). Still, the extremist right lacked the ability to form a cohesive coalition amongst themselves. Right-wing extremists also lacked the ability to exploit the growing fear and frustration manifested in the politics of the white mainstream.
That all changed in 1992 when violent rioting in Los Angeles and disturbances in other major American cities left 60 dead and over one billion dollars in property damage. Television broadcasts of racial assaults and lootings coupled with an anemic police and national guard response were just the kind of images needed to unify the extreme right. Militia advocate Larry Pratt stated that the Los Angeles riots were a "great lesson in self defense" that illustrated the "importance of having an armed militia to organize quickly and effectively to defend people in their homes and in their stores and their livelihoods" (Dees with Corcoron, 1996, p. 54). And the impression that the government allowed violent disorder to reign against innocent unarmed white citizens was hardly limited to extremists, it struck a chord with mainstream whites as well. In the 30 days following the acquittal of the police officers charged in the Rodney King beating, interracial hate crime of all sorts soared throughout the United States (Levin, 1993).
TRAGEDY AT RUBY RIDGE
Another violent tragedy later that same year made the government appear to many not just as an impotent bystander, but as a violent aggressor against its own citizens. Christian Identity adherent and self proclaimed white separatist Randy Weaver was wanted on charges of selling two sawed off shotguns to a federal informant. Weaver and his wife, Vicki, had moved to a wood cabin on an isolated hill in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, to raise their family under fundamentalist Identity style principles and to isolate themselves from the rest of society. A plywood sign with red letters at the entrance to Weaver’s property proclaimed, "Every Knee Shall Bow to the Yashua Messiah" (Walter, 1995, p. 5).
On August 21, 1992, a deadly gun battle broke out between Weaver, his teenage son Samuel, family friend Kevin Harris and U.S. Marshals surveilling his remote property. By day’s end, Samuel Weaver and William Degan,