In these dispatches, I use the term “anti-government patriot” to describe the hard right in the United States. I believe the phrase captures the basic connection between a wildly diverse collection of groups. They hate the government but they love the country. The intensity of their hatred for government is how they express their love for their country. They believe that the federal authority is destroying the true America.
That core belief expresses itself in hundreds, if not thousands, of different ways. Tracking the changing beliefs of the hard right would require daily, sometimes hourly reports. Conspiracy theories are metastasizing across American conservatism continuously. Who the Boogaloo bois are now will be different by the time you are reading this. They began as a hard-right white power group; they have split into a race war wing and a libertarian wing. Some have showed up recently at Black Lives Matter protests in support of the protestors. Similarly, QAnon, a wide-ranging conspiracy theory grounded in the belief that high-level Democratic operatives have been involved in elaborate pedophile rings, has morphed into a whole range of conspiracies around the “deep state.” These ideologies are fragile but oddly durable; they smash and reform all the time.
The hard right in America today ranges from men and women a few steps over from small-government conservatives to outright criminals and the insane. Their reasons for hating the government vary. There are tax protestors who believe that income tax is illegitimate and there are sovereign citizens who don’t believe that the Fourteenth Amendment is valid. Differences of style matter, too. The alt-right is polished in its racism. The Ku Klux Klan isn’t. There are Second Amendment absolutists and there are minutemen and there are sagebrush rebels and there are border vigilantes. Even among the white power wing of the anti-government patriot movement, there are white supremacists and there are white nationalists and there are white identitarians and there are neo-Nazis—none of them exactly the same in motivation or in action. Many of these intellectual currents run into each other. They often overlap. But none requires the others. It is possible to hate the federal government’s involvement in public lands and not be, at the same time, a white nationalist or even a racist. There are sovereign citizens who are Black.
Rather than following one coherent ideology, or series of ideologies, the hard right offers a buffet of sensibilities. Each individual picks and chooses: white power, Christian identity, the inviolability of the Second Amendment, tax loathing, the belief in the illegitimacy of the federal government. Conspiracy theories blossom, and intertwine, and separate. New factions appear every couple of months. The militias emerge from a general anti-government feeling that is the widespread base of support—at least a third of the country. That base is the ground from which domestic extremists sprout.
Don’t mistake intellectual incoherence with weakness. The power of the anti-government patriots is real and rising. The hard right is much larger and much more violent than almost anybody believes. A study from the Institute for Family Studies in 2018 suggested that nearly 11 million Americans “share the attitudes” of the alt-right alone. The vast majority of terrorism in the United States comes from the hard right, and the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database shows the number of terrorist incidents in the United States has tripled since 2013. During the decades in which America obsessed over the rise of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, it failed to notice the rise of a homegrown equivalent, radical Americanism, a pocket heartland ISIS.
The bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded in 2020 that “far-right terrorism has significantly outpaced terrorism from other types of perpetrators, including from far-left networks and individuals inspired by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.… Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.” The success of hard-right terrorism has led to a rise in accelerationism: the desire to hasten a civil war by inciting violent chaos. Two neo-Nazi organizations, the Atomwaffen Division (using the German word for atomic weapons) and The Base, a white power version of Al Qaeda, promote terrorism as part of a plan to institute a white ethnostate after a systematic collapse of the United States.
Even the fringe movements of anti-government patriots are sizable. A low estimate of the number of sovereign citizens in the United States starts at 300,000, the number of people who refused to file their taxes out of principle, a felony. To put that in perspective, the Weather Underground was estimated, at its peak, to contain a thousand members. The estimate of the number of Black Panthers rises as high as 10,000, a highly debatable figure; the Panthers talked a great deal about the need for violence but managed to commit very little. The most power they ever gained were seats on a few local government commissions in Oakland. The Panthers and the Weather Underground caused immense panic in the late sixties—and massive responses from the FBI. The sovereign citizens, and the anti-government patriot movement as a whole, are much more numerous; they are armed, they are anxious for the government to fall, and they regularly murder dozens of people a year. In 2012 the FBI began listing sovereign citizenry as its top domestic terrorist threat.
Sovereign citizens believe they are sovereigns unto themselves and therefore do not have to pay attention to any laws that legislatures pass or to law enforcement. They believe that the federal government is a fictitious entity that is operating outside the purview of the Constitution for the purposes of holding US citizens in slavery. Their ideas hovered on the extreme fringes of American politics until the housing crisis of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama. Then they exploded. Declining financial power and the rise of multicultural iconography—the sovereign citizens are its fruit.
The anti-government patriots, and the sovereign citizens who are their most extreme members, are the most overt reflection of lost white privilege in the United States. Fueled by the loss of faith in government and the rising sense of aggrieved white diminishment, theirs is a totalizing vision of absolute individual freedom and resistance toward the state as such. “Understanding Sovereign Citizenry ideology is like trying to map a crack that develops on your windshield after a pebble hits it. It’s a wild and chaotic mess,” Ryan Lenz, a senior investigator for the Southern Poverty Law Center, tells me. Sometimes the spirit of disobedience expresses itself in fanatical violence, as in the case of Jerry Kane, who killed police officers at a routine traffic stop in Memphis. At other times it expresses itself as convoluted tax dodges, as in the case of the founder of the Republic for the united States of America (RuSA), James Timothy Turner, who was convicted of posting a $300 million fictitious bond in his own name. He traveled the country in 2008 and 2009 conducting seminars about elaborate systems underlying the tax code and how ordinary people could use his knowledge of the system to excuse themselves from financial obligations—or, to put it in the FBI’s more familiar terms, to defraud the IRS. Turner has been sentenced to eighteen years in prison. Bruce Doucette, a sovereign “judge” who traveled the country offering a similar financial salvation, planned alternative state legislatures. He received thirty-eight years in jail.
One pet theory of the sovereign citizens is that the Fourteenth Amendment, first passed after the Civil War, is illegitimate, making the current government merely “de facto.” The real government, the government the sovereign citizens recognize or imagine, is “de jure.” The movement has become famous for their elaborate disruptions of court procedure. They are masters of “paper terrorism.” A favorite tactic is to take out false liens on judges trying their cases, thereby forcing a recusal. “Between 2012 and 2014, there was a massive effort in the United States to make sure that county clerks, in rural areas and in metropolitan areas, knew what to look for when a sovereign came in to file something fictitious,” Lenz says. They draw vast consequences from the tiniest details. My favorite example: the flags in most American courts have gold fringes, traditionally the style of the American navy. Therefore, according to some sovereign citizen theories, when you enter court and pass out of the gallery, you are entering a jurisdiction where maritime law applies. Their theory of the straw man, another convoluted idea of legal precedent, fuses conspiracy with economic salvation in a typically secretive vision of hidden powers shaping daily reality. They believe that “there is a federal account associated with you, which the federal government has invested in you, based on your future earnings,” Lenz tells me. It’s a secret account that citizens have access to if they know how. “There are sovereign citizens out there who believe that the US government is run by reptilian aliens,” Lenz says. “Turner said he had documents that proved that the US government had made intergalactic peace treaties with alien nations.” Literally, the conspiracies go beyond the surface of the earth.
“The sovereign citizens are preparing for when the government falls, not if,” Lenz says. Sovereign citizens commit crimes more or less daily in the United States. In April 2014, Jerad and Amanda Miller, sovereign citizens who were present at the Bundy standoff, killed two police officers at a CiCi’s Pizza in Las Vegas. They pinned a note to one of the cops’ bodies: “This is the beginning of the revolution.” They told the horrified onlookers: “The revolution has started.” In 2014 a survey conducted with US officers in intelligence services across the country found sovereign citizens to be law enforcement’s top concern.
The resistance movement to the United States is broad and deep and violent. It is intellectually incoherent but ferociously devoted. This is essential to understand: the incoherence is part of the appeal. The lack of a coherent or stable ideology means that the knowledge is esoteric, the world illuminated by a hidden meaning known only to the initiated. When you don’t have an explicit ideology, a practice, you can’t be blamed for the effects of that ideology: If you call yourself a Nazi, you have to embrace the history of Nazism. But with fast-moving conspiracy theories wrapped in satire, you get all the advantages of belonging to a tribe, with none of the responsibilities. The internet provides a way to flirt with reality; you can always claim you were just kidding, or you can go and kill a cop. Increasingly, accelerationism, the faction of the anti-government patriot movement that wishes to bring about civil war, is losing all ideological content. They praise the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh alike. They just want the destruction of the state. To what purpose matters less and less.
The American hard right operates on a spectrum from the criminally insane to law enforcement officials. In a way, that spectrum makes the true size of the movement harder to perceive: you can dismiss the criminals as criminals, and the law-abiding pose no immediate threat. But the spectrum shows a breadth of support in the country at large that is not the result of local conditions. There is a widespread, if confusing, popular support for opposition to the US government. And, even more confusingly, several of those anti-government forces have moved into government. Two congresswomen elected in 2020—Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado—publicly backed the QAnon conspiracy theory. Mainstream conservatism and the Republican political establishment are both involved in anti-government patriotism. Extremist views are no longer extreme.
Confusion is a natural state at the beginning of any collapse. In other countries and in other times, it’s never been clear, at least at first, whether a civil war was properly underway. Who is a rebel and who is a bandit? Who is a freedom fighter and who is a terrorist? The line between criminality and revolution blurred in Mexico, in Cuba, in Northern Ireland, in Algeria—everywhere. What if America is already in the middle of an armed uprising and we just haven’t noticed? What if we’re just not used to armed uprisings happening in places we know?
Neo-Confederates, white nationalists, straight Nazis, Klansmen, the alt-right, Three Percenters, Spartan youths, the American Golden Dawn, Frontiersmen, Oath Keepers—all come to the bridge brandishing swastikas, Odal runes, Black Suns, Iron Crosses, the Valknut, Confederate battle flags, Deus Vult crosses, and many other symbols. The largest militias, the ones that set up separate compounds, are the Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia, the New York Light Foot Militia, the Virginia Minutemen Militia, and the Oregoners, but eventually militia members from all fifty states, including a lone representative from Hawaii, set up camp.
They use generators for power. They purify their water with colloidal silver. They finally have a chance to use all the materials they have bought at the prepper conferences. The area downstream of the bridge fills up with booths selling rations and weapons and tactical wear and books about manufacturing your own bazooka, and planting a garden after a nuclear event, and Muslim infiltration into the CIA, and Jewish control of the media. During the day, the space around the bridge resembles an open-air gun show.
The story dominates coverage on all formats. Time magazine is the first to describe them as the Army of the Interstate. CNN becomes a twenty-four-hour “Battle of the Bridge” station. Every hotel and Airbnb in the county is taken. The international press soon follows. No quantum of information is too insignificant when it comes to the Sheriff or the county in defiance. Every nuance of the arguments on all sides is rehashed on the Sunday talk shows. Meanwhile, every militant group has brought DSLR cameras alongside its arsenal and survival supplies. They livestream their resistance. The line between hard-right journalistic organizations and hard-right militias is blurry at the best of times. The crisis at the bridge erases any distinction. The struggle isn’t over a bridge but over a narrative. It begins in a county but it is fought, at first, over the networks—the internet, television, the means of information.
At night, the militias gather for torchlit rallies. The most popular chant—alongside “You will not replace us” and “Blood and soil”—is “This is what democracy looks like.” Every night the crowd stands on the bridge to show how much weight it can bear. “This bridge stays open,” they howl. It makes can’t-miss television, wildly viral memes.
When asked by a Times reporter whether he supports the festival of rage in his county, the Sheriff answers, “Isn’t freedom of speech wonderful?”
When Rachel Maddow describes the scene as “the Woodstock of Hate,” the Sheriff approves. “I guess it’s time real Americans had a party of their own.” The Sheriff is an icon to the groups on the bridge, no matter their affiliation. When he speaks, he doesn’t need a microphone. Everyone goes silent.
Among the swastikas and the banner of the Army of Northern Virginia, a new flag is lifted. The Black Gadsden has the traditional rattlesnake and the motto DON’T TREAD ON ME, but on a black background.
Around this time, the Sheriff begins to deputize various senior members of the larger militias. NBC coins the phrase “American ISIS” to describe the development. Fox claims the Sheriff needs deputies to maintain order during “the extraordinary surge of freedom” at the bridge. “We are officially dealing with traitors,” Frank Bruni writes. Podcasters on the left predict an imminent national coup, spearheaded by the Sheriff. A ProPublica poll finds that 73 percent of Americans agree with the statement “The Sheriff represents a rebellion against the legitimate government of the United States.” But only 36 percent agree that “the US government should intervene with military force.”
Again, you don’t have to imagine. The anti-government patriots are preparing now for the collapse of the United States. They are readying themselves for a conflict with their own government. You can go see them.
On the fringe of Bowling Green sits Woodland Mall, where the Ohio Prepper and Survivalist Summit takes place. The several dozen booths sell not only a lot of guns but also solar-powered flashlights that keep a charge for seven years and plastic buckets containing 120 emergency rations for $274.99. (Gluten-free is available if you plan on a gluten-free collapse.) The summit offers a range of courses on the art of retreating in the event of civilizational collapse, ranging from bug-out planning and building caches and black-powder DIY to bushcraft skills and homeopathy, archery and self-defense. Frontiersmen—an organized prepper group—wander the booths with pistols at their belts. The Oath Keepers wear black shirts identifying themselves as security.
Preparations for the new collapse look exhausting. Jim Cobb is the author of several books, including Prepper’s Armed Defense, and Cobb’s plans for surviving the apocalypse are intensive. Pick three bug-out locations in different directions from your residences, all of them under 200 miles from your home so you can get there without a full tank of gas in your car. You should also plan three routes to each of your three locations. That makes nine routes in all. Don’t mark them down on a map, either. What if you’re stopped on the way? Then people can tell where your bug-out locations are and go steal your stuff. Cobb tells us to use our heads: “Use it for more than a hat rack.” At each bug-out location, Cobb suggests keeping the weapons cache on the outskirts of the property in case of “unplanned party attendees.” And above all, drill. Your wife might not like it. Your kids might not like it. “Drills suck,” as Cobb says. Still, you have to drill to build up “muscle memory.” Everybody needs a bug-out bag, of course. He stalks the front of the classroom with the jaunt of a middle manager explaining effective sales strategy to a regional office for the nth time.
The fantasies of the preppers are absurd and melancholy, but they aren’t useless. Eve Gonzales teaches home medicine and post-collapse gardening. She has the sad eyes of a woman growing tired of explaining things to people who will not listen, like she’s run the school library in a small town for too long. Beside me, a female soy farmer with gray hair and a floral shirt from the seventies talks to a guy in a National Guard T-shirt with a copy of Gary Lincoff’s The Joy of Foraging about the merits of eating Queen Anne’s lace. It’s very good for you but you have to be careful. It’s so similar to hemlock.
Gonzales wants her audience to develop “the skill of sprouting.” Bean sprouts are full of nutrients and grow quickly. She wants us all to buy heirloom seeds, which self-germinate. You can harvest seeds from them, but you should remember that germination declines by up to 50 percent over five years. And don’t forget about protecting your harvest. The preppers agree that, in a crisis, everybody wants to steal from everybody else. The biggest thief will be the government. Gonzales warns us equally about looters and the federal authorities. Her solution is brilliant: Fill your garden with nutritious weeds—dollar weed, lamb’s-quarter, amaranth, dandelions. “The government, by executive order, can take everything, but they don’t take dandelions,” she says.
Nick Getzinger, the executive officer to the president of the Ohio Oath Keepers and the owner of the Oath Keepers Outpost, teaches the class on survival caches. The caches are built out of PVC tubes and then buried at secured sites. Mainly, Getzinger fills his PVC tube with incredibly elaborate ways of purifying water. (Everyone takes for granted that the LifeStraw, a straw-style water filter, is insufficient, although everyone recommends buying one anyway.) His methodology for water purification includes a combination of hypochlorite, colloidal silver, and charcoal. For starting a fire, he uses a Fresnel lens or wax-coated matches. He recommends a Mylar blanket for a solar oven and Vietnam-era ponchos because of the way they roll up. A complete cache also includes snares, a hacksaw blade, seeds, silica packs, and oxidizer to reduce the effects of moisture. He advocates a new kind of slingshot that flings projectiles from a circle (“more accurate than a wrist rocket”). As for ammunition, he suggests a consistent round in all the guns you own. You don’t want to have a .38 pistol and .45 bullets, do you?
The preppers share a specific fantasy. It’s not nuclear winter. It’s not climate change. It is a world without authority in which roving bands attempt to raid your hard-won supplies, and self-sufficiency and self-defense determine survival. It’s all conspicuously similar to what the American frontier looked like—or, rather, what the American frontier looks like in the movies. The students are often enjoined to “think like the pioneers.” The preppers and survivalists aren’t just imagining the end of America. They’re imagining it beginning again.
And in that dream of rebirth is the seed of a radical politics. Apart from guns, the most popular items for sale are “Black Guns Matter” T-shirts and flags with the coiled “Don’t Tread on Me” snake—the usual. There’s a Spartan helmet with the letters MOΛΩN ΛABE underneath. MOΛΩN ΛABE translates to “Come and take,” the defiant response of Leonidas, king of Sparta, when Xerxes, king of the Persians, demanded he surrender his weapons at the battle of Thermopylae. In this analogy, the US government is the Persians and the preppers are Spartans.
The high point of the Ohio Prepper and Survivalist Summit is the appearance of Challice Finicum Finch, whose father died in a standoff with the FBI. Twenty-six years old, with four kids, blond, skinny, she knows who the bad guys are. The bad guys are the federal government. What precisely happened to Finicum Finch’s father is subject to debate. Nobody doubts that, in 2016, LaVoy Finicum was involved in a gunfight with federal agents as his group occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon. Nobody seems to dispute that Finicum crashed his pickup into a snowbank and attempted to flee on foot. The FBI version of subsequent events is that Finicum was shot while reaching for a firearm and that while he was being arrested he shouted: “Go ahead and shoot me. You’re going to have to shoot me.”
The police declared his shooting justified. But one of the FBI agents, W. Joseph Astarita, was indicted on charges of lying and obstruction about who fired first. (He was later acquitted of all charges.) Challice Finicum Finch believes that her father was shot in the back three times and left overnight to die in the snow.
For her, the question of federal authority is not just a grand matter of democratic validity, nor is it a technical issue of jurisdiction. It is a matter of blood.
“We are in slavery,” she announces to the audience.
Why are Americans in slavery?
“If you don’t own anything, you are a slave.”
And why don’t Americans own anything?
“If you don’t pay your property tax, you’ll find out pretty soon if you own anything. You have purchased the right to rent from the government.”
She asks: “Who’s been fined by Obama, for not having healthcare?” A couple of hands shoot up. “You don’t own your body.”
How did Americans become slaves? Finicum Finch’s answer is that they didn’t read the Constitution. She enjoins the audience to weekly, even daily reading of their foundational text.
What did Finicum Finch find in it? She found that the states supersede the federal government because the states created the federal government. She discovered that the federal government holds “80 percent” of land in the west, land to which it is not entitled.
She tells the story of a recent encounter with the police. “I got pulled over and, like a little slave, I did everything the officer told me to do and then I get home and I realize, hey, that was wrong. He just trampled my rights.”
The audience is full of veterans and police officers. The armed anti-government forces are rising among those who serve or once served the government they condemn. Finicum Finch loves the police forces and those who serve. She repeats that she isn’t anti-government; she’s just anti–corrupt government. That line is the line on which the new radical Americanism rides.
The men and women wandering the stalls at the Prepper Summit buy the books and the seeds and the guns to imagine themselves resisting federal authority. The books, the seeds, the classes, the guns—all of them are accessories to a story Americans tell themselves in increasing numbers. In that story, the US government is the bad guy and they are the good guys.
At the Woodland Mall they know that whatever freedom is, they don’t have it. “How far are you willing to be pushed?” Challice Finicum Finch asks. “When is your faith going to be bigger than your fear?” And while it seems impossible to imagine the overthrow of the system of the American government at this moment in time, “do we not believe in a God of miracles?”