Why did the militia movement decline after 1996?

[Agonized-Statism]

From Wikipedia:

"Although the far-right patriot movement had long been a fringe factor in American politics, cultural factors paved the way for the wide-scale growth of the ideological militia movement. The catalysts came with the FBI's 1992 shootout with Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, and the 1993 Waco siege involving David Koresh and the Branch Davidians at Mt. Carmel in Waco, Texas.

A 1999 US Department of Justice analysis of the potential militia threat at the millennium conceded that the vast majority of militias were reactive (not proactive) and posed no threat. By 2001, the militia movement seemed to be in decline, having peaked in 1996 with 858 groups. With the post-2007 global financial crisis and the election of Barack Obama to the United States presidency in 2008, militia activity experienced a resurgence. Militia groups have recently been involved in several high-profile standoffs, including the Bundy Standoff in 2014 and the Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016."

Why did the militia movement decline after its 1996 peak?

[Agonized-Statism]

Loss of funding from the federal government as local actors to sabotage the rising left and the same government working round the clock to crush them as mop-up operations. A lot of these militias descended from anti-activist groups harassing anti-war and civil rights protesters.

I agree that this happens a lot, but I don't know if this accurately explains the militia movement's origins. Many of them were middle-aged men from the Plains responding to the violent confrontation at Ruby Ridge, the Waco Siege, and gun control legislation after radicalization during the hardships of the 1980s Farm Crisis (lots of far-right literature circulated through those small towns at that time apparently). That's a different generation than the anti-activists of the 1960s-1970s, part of a culture war that basically forgot to visit the Plains- the rural Midwest slept through the counterculture so soundly that they still had '50s music by the time '50s nostalgia started.

[Agonized-Statism]

This sounds fascinating. Are there any examples of how 50s music survived in the Plains well into the 80s and 90s?

There's unfortunately not a lot of academic sources that track the development and popularity of music by region, especially not from that time and in that region, but the heartland rock that gave the Midwest its voice from the 1970s onwards (and still does according to my insider source in rural Iowa; poor guy) directly evolved out of '50s rock and roll and the folk music revival that began in the '40s. In fact, lot of future heartland rock acts started out regionally as regular rock n' roll and R&B musicians. Holdouts from the western-influenced third generation of country music, like Willie Nelson and Marty Robbins, remained popular in the Plains. The Plains were in a stasis where the contributions of hippies and non-whites throughout the 1960s mostly passed them by, and I interpret their eventual taking to metal music to be a continuation of the trends that people like Elvis symbolized in the '50s (versus the more cosmopolitan route that created disco, synthpop, hip hop, rap, and so on).