September 01, 2025

Unwell and Unregulated: The Militia Movement

54 minutes

EPISODE 144 | Unwell and Unregulated: The Militia Movement

The United States has always had a certain comfort level with violence, or at least the idea of it. Throughout its history, groups of armed citizens will threaten to use, or actually use, force to get their point across, either to effect change or to prevent that from happening.

But in the 1990s, something changed, and groups formed around new ideologies that sometimes had little to do with objective reality. The Militia Movement was mainly rural, white, far-right Christians who’d been nurtured on conspiracy theories and half truths which they had chosen to believe because these made some sort of emotional sense to them, and because they had an unerring sense that they were right and everyone else was wrong. And some of them were willing to go to great lengths to achieve their aims.

This is the breeding ground for the modern conspirasphere.

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SECTIONS

02:38 - Saturday Night Special - Precursors, the Minutemen, the Patriotic Party, Liberty Lobby, the Christian Defense League (CDL), Posse Comitatus

08:27 - Guns in the Sky - The Late Great Planet Earth, Aryan Nations, National Alliance, The Turner Diaries, Hunter, evangelicals, the Satanic Panic, still more anti-Jewish ideas, "Red Dawn"

14:20 - Ride a White Horse - Behold a Pale Horse, Milton William Cooper, Hour of the Time, Mysteries of Babylon

23:40 - Ruby Tuesday - Agenda 21, the Weaver family, the Ruby Ridge siege

30:56 - This Could Be Heaven - Victor Houteff starts Shepherd's Rod (later Branch Davidians), Vernon Howell becomes David Koresh and takes over, the Waco Siege

36:48 - Oklahoma Blues - The Militia of Montana (MOM), the Michigan Militia (Wolverines), Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing

39:56 - Militias take off and expand, attracting scammers and opportunists - Ron Cole, General Benton Partin, Mary Elizabeth Broderick, Roy Schwasinger & We the People, LeRoy Schweitzer & the Montana Freemen, Justus Township standoff

45:30 - Insane in the Brain - Militias also attract terrorists and lunatics - Willie Ray Lampley & the Universal Church of God (Yahweh) plus the Oklahoma Constitutional Militia plan massive bombings, the Unabomber, Georgia Republic, the Mountaineer Militia, Donald Beauregard & and Trix cereal, Mark "Mike from Michigan" Koernke, Norm Olsen, Charles Duke, Bob Fletcher and Belgian weather control, John Parsons talks purple UFOs and starts the Tri-States Militia of South Dakota (but turns out to be on the FBI payroll), Darrel Frech, Rick McLaren and space rays, Ted Gunderson sells pseudoscience gear, Bo "Rambo" Gritz pushes Y2K, Jack McLamb writes Operation Vampire Killer 2000: American Police Action Plan for Stopping World Government Rule

Music by Fanette Ronjat

More Info

Militia movement in the 1990s at EBSCO

Militias in the US at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue

5 Things You Need to Know about Private Militia Groups from the National Police Foundation

Examining Extremism: The Militia Movement at CSIS

False Patriots report at the Southern Poverty Law Center, May 8, 2001

Posse Comitatus

The Late Great Planet Earth

The Turner Diaries - America's manual of hatred on BBC (audio, 9 minutes)

What to Do With the Most Dangerous Book in America

The Turner Legacy: The Storied Origins and Enduring Impact of White Nationalism’s Deadly Bible

CONSPIRACY THEORIES IN THE PATRIOT/MILITIA MOVEMENT

Behold a Pale Horse

Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America

Ruby Ridge, 1992: the day the American militia movement was born

Maniacs and Militias: Waco to Extremist Groups

Turning Point: The Rise of Right-Wing Politics, the Waco Siege, and the Response of American Law Enforcement

Legacy Everlasting: how the 1993 Waco siege became a symbolic rallying cry for the American far right decades later

Clinton administration’s deadly mistake in Waco gave rise to Oklahoma City, Columbine in the New York Post (labelled as "entertainment", which seems odd)

The infamous Texas siege with a ‘straight line’ to QAnon, right-wing militias, and January 6

Two Minutes Past Nine: The story behind the Oklahoma City bombing on BBC

Remembering the Oklahoma City Bombing, 25 Years Later at the Brennan Center for Justice

From Ruby Ridge to Oklahoma City: The Radicalization of Timothy McVeigh paper

The Militia Movement and Second Amendment Revolution: Conjuring with the People 1996 paper

Beyond the Bombing: The Militia Menace Grows report by the ADL

Operation Vampire Killer 2000 text

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