A few weeks ago, after nine members of the Hutaree militia were arrested in and around Ann Arbor, an editor at The Times asked me to follow up my series on the election by writing an op-ed piece about militia activities in Michigan. He wanted to know if the average person living in the state had any contact with the militia. Coincidentally, just a few days earlier my son Noah, who was home from college, informed me that he’d gone to school with the son of a couple that belonged not only to the militia, but to the Hutaree. I worked frantically to research and write an essay for The Times; as usual, they chopped it up and cut it by 2/3. But I was happy to see it finally run in the April 19th edition of the paper, on the same page as an essay by Bill Clinton about his memories of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Here’s a link to the op-ed piece: The Extremists Next Door
And here’s the original essay, as I wrote it, followed by the photos Marian took of that militia event we attended:
The flags flapping above the picnic area warned “Liberty or Death” and “Do Not Tread on Me,” while the man behind the registration table sold bull’s eyes and IRS 1040 forms to be used as targets for the adult and youth shooting contests later in the day. But most of the action at last Saturday’s “Militia Field Day aka Tax Blast: Open Carry Family Picnic & Tea Party,” held at Island Lake Recreation Area in Brighton, Michigan, consisted of militia members and their families chowing down on pulled pork and kielbasa. One militia man squatted beneath a tree, giving lessons on how to start a fire using two sticks. Another played “Dixie” on his harmonica. A tiny girl in pink clutched a stuffed dinosaur with one hand and her father with the other; like most of the militia members, he wore army boots, fatigues, and a big black pistol on his hip.
Tax Blast is an annual event. But this year, the emphasis seemed less on riddling 1040 forms with bullets than demonstrating that the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia is in no way affiliated with the Hutarees, an apocalyptic Christian branch of the militia, nine of whose members recently were arrested for allegedly plotting to assassinate police officers and kill any nonmilitia members who stumbled upon their reconnaissance operations in the woods.
Living in Ann Arbor, I don’t usually feel threatened by the militias. Most members are just indulging their fantasies of being warriors without having to sign up for the army and go to Afghanistan or Iraq. They want to be heroes and save their neighbors from disaster. Many of the guys in the yuppie southeast Michigan branch of the militia consider themselves to be socially progressive libertarians and welcome anyone, Jewish, black, or Muslim, who declares him or herself willing to defend Michigan from invasion, whether by the federal government or foreign terrorists. (The lid on one chafing dish at the picnic read “Kosher Meals Available,” while another dish proclaimed its contents to be suitable for vegans and vegetarians. The kosher dish stood empty until an exceedingly large armed man wearing a black T-shirt that read “When I Snap You’ll Be the First To Go” filled the tinfoil tray with Hebrew National hot dogs.) I even understand some militia members’ fears: I don’t like wiretaps or surveillance cameras, and, during the Bush administration, I often found myself frightened of my own government.
But I am chilled to think of thousands of armed militia members from all over the country marching on Washington, D.C., and Virginia this coming Monday to “celebrate” the fifteenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing and “restore the Constitution.” “PATRIOTS WILL ASSEMBLE IN VIRGINIA AND MARCH ON WASHINGTON ON APRIL 19. THIS WILL BE AN ‘OPEN CARRY’ MARCH. BRING YOUR GUNS. PATRIOTS WILL TAKE BACK AMERICA FROM THE OBAMA OCCUPATIONAL GOVERNMENT,” reads a post to a Rush Limbaugh fan site on Google. “Civil war starts April 19, 2010? Nervous nation waits for armed march on Washington, DC (bang)” proclaims the website of a group called New World Order Fighters.
Many of the militia members at the Tax Blast told me they can’t take time off from their jobs to travel to Washington for the protest. But a rifle team leader named Solo, an IT specialist who lives in Troy, plans on attending. He worries that President Obama is going to make an end run around the Second Amendment by requiring every bullet in America to be inscribed with a traceable serial number, or by pricing ammo out of the reach of the common citizen, or by allowing Hillary Clinton to negotiate an international treaty that bides us to the same anti-gun laws that European nations must obey. “I want to let people on the east and west coasts know that people in the middle of the country want to keep their guns,” Solo told me. The timing of the event – April 19 – doesn’t bother him; what bothers him is that “that asshole” Timothy McVeigh “ruined a perfectly good holiday.”
Solo and most of the other militia members who intend to march on Washington aren’t planning on killing anyone. But I can’t help but wonder how can we distinguish those who are from those who aren’t? If I come upon a group of people dressed in fatigues, toting weapons, and ranting about the New World Order, how I am supposed to tell whether they belong to a slightly paranoid libertarian division of the militia, or a violently delusional, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic branch?
A few months before the Hutarees were arrested, the supervisor of a town not far from Ann Arbor called upon two brigades of the Michigan Militia, including the Hutarees, to help find two missing residents. When this story came to light, my son saw a photo of one of the Hutarees and said, “Hey, I know her.” As it turned out, the woman’s stepson was my son’s high school classmate, and my son, who considers himself a socialist, sometimes engaged the boy in friendly discussions of their opposing political beliefs. The boy’s stepmother and father live in Manchester, a town I visit to browse for antiques, attend the chicken broil, and enjoy ice cream at the Dairy Queen beside the river, although the woman apparently joined the Hutarees after meeting several members at a Ron Paul rally right here in Ann Arbor.
My son also knows the militia member who coordinated the search, having interviewed the man for an article he wrote for his school newspaper describing an event at which several hundred 9/11 Truthers gathered at the University of Michigan to publicize their theory that the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job. I admire my son for engaging people so unlike himself in political discussions. But I hate to think of him getting in an argument with a rightwing extremist who is packing a weapon and believes that socialists are destroying our country and, as I heard on a podcast describing the reasons for the upcoming march, “the only way we can stop them is to make them stop.”
Any group that sees a reason to “celebrate” the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing terrifies me. I moved to Michigan eight months before Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building. Although McVeigh wasn’t a member of the Michigan Militia, he did attend one of their meetings and practiced building bombs at a farm 120 miles northeast of Ann Arbor. At the time, Mark Koernke, aka “Mark from Michigan, the Voice of the Militia,” worked as a janitor at the U of M, where I teach, and in his off hours hosted a vitriolic radio show, which he used as a forum to support McVeigh’s incendiary views. The radio show was broadcast from Koernke’s hometown of Dexter, a quaint village a few miles up the river from Ann Arbor, where my then-husband and I would take our son to buy cider and homemade donuts.
After the carnage in Oklahoma City and President Clinton’s exit from the White House, much of the militia activity in Michigan subsided. Koernke got sent to jail for fleeing the scene of a robbery he didn’t commit and resisting the efforts of police to question him. But the crazies still were out there. One afternoon in 2003, I was reading a book about a virulently racist and anti-Semitic hate group called the Christian Identity movement when I received a call from Zingerman’s Deli asking me to come downtown to finalize plans for my son’s bar mitzvah. I got in my car and, a few blocks from the restaurant, noticed Christian Identity bumper stickers on the truck in front of me.
Then came the 2008 presidential campaign and the near collapse of the American economy, and the militias regained support, not only in towns to the north and west, but in the southeast corner of the state, around Ann Arbor and Detroit. The SMVM was quick to distance itself from the Hutarees; their spokesperson even hinted to me at the Tax Blast that he and his guys had a hand in alerting the FBI to the Hutarees’ agenda. But the anger and paranoia that fueled the resurgence of the militias didn’t evaporate overnight because a few extremists were arrested. Not long after the FBI took the Hutarees into custody, I tuned my laptop to the Intelligence Report, once again being broadcast from Dexter by Mark Koernke, who had served his sentence and was treating his listeners to the ominous click of a bullet being loaded in the chamber of a gun and warnings about his perimeter being secured and the first nine people who breached that perimeter being doomed.
Libertarian militia members might welcome nonChristian members, but when I read on the Hutarees’ website that they were prepared to use the sword “to defend all those who belong to Christ and save those who aren’t,” I wonder what they intended to “save” me and my Jewish and Muslim neighbors from. So, despite my desire to preserve the liberties granted by our Constitution, I can’t help but be grateful that the federal government does have the power to keep surveillance on extremists of all kinds and seems able to figure out which few members of which few militias are serious about wanting to assassinate police officers or shoot people like me who might wander into the woods while they are training for Armageddon.
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