Opinion of the Militia Movement of the 90's?

[useful idiot]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_movement

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

Option 3

[JSojourner]

Option two.  I had some personal run-ins with these clowns and their "common law courts". Dangerous nut cases.

[Mint]

From what you just said it sounds like you ran into Posse Comitatus.

[Free Palestine]

Not all of these people are batsh**t insane, you know.

[Lief 🗽]

Crazy fascists.

[useful idiot]

I actually asked the question because I've had basically two major experiences with people who identify with the movement, and who are very different.

In the first case, my ex-stepfather's dad was a member of a militia, had a cabin in Idaho, the whole nine yards. He was a fascist under any definition of the term(his family fled Croatia at the end of the war, being funneled out through Italy to Argentina, before settling in Washington State).

My second major association with the movement comes from the fact that I go to a lot of gun shows. A lot of the guys I meet there who go to cabins in the mountains to shoot and talk politics tend to be very libertarian, and not fascist at all; some of them are Deadheads, which is how I sort of struck up a couple of friendships. They're basically Ron Paul voters, a lot of them smoke pot, and they aren't really racist at all from what I can tell. Some people at these shows, however, have a strange fetish for Nazi memorabilia and are probably racists.

The more I tend to look into it, the more obvious it becomes how diverse the groups people often label "militia" are.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

These people believed that Y2K was not only something worth worrying about but would be catastrophic and that Clinton planned on confiscating all civilian firearms. Idiots in a nutshell, so option 2.

[JSojourner]

From what you just said it sounds like you ran into Posse Comitatus.

It was a local group called "Our One Supreme Court".  They claimed to be somehow connected with a Christian Church.  

I had been hearing about a number of local county judges who were being targeted by these people with bogus liens, threatening mail and some oddball lawsuits.  At the time, it sounded like P.C. to me, too.  So I did an hour long interview with a judge from a neighboring county who was particularly annoyed by these clowns...and (this was a minor coup for me) we were also able to get Ohio State Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Moyer for most of the hour.  Someone sent me an op-ed he wrote about this.

Well, being that it was a Christian radio station, I knew some of our listeners were extremists.  Most, I am sure, just listened and digested what they heard.  But my call screener said there were a number of crank calls, hangups and a couple of threats that day.

About a week later, in my mail, I got a "summons" to appear before "Our One Supreme Court".  LOL -- it said I would be contacted by telephone or "other means" to let me know when and where the "court" would convene.  They charged me with treason against the United States and being "an enemy of the Gospel of Christ".  It was my understanding that the local judge received a similar mailings, but with different "charges".  Everything was handed over to the police and I never heard a word about it again.  To my knowledge, no one was arrested.  I am not sure there were grounds.

As to being "militia", that was the big (and more public) part of their schtick.  They would show up in pseudo-military uniforms, sometimes with guns, at King Day celebrations and other community events they considered "political correctness and multiculturalism run amok".

[Dr. Cynic]

Nuts.