{"id":9819,"date":"2010-04-01T12:05:54","date_gmt":"2010-04-01T17:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=9819"},"modified":"2010-04-01T10:50:13","modified_gmt":"2010-04-01T15:50:13","slug":"the-well-defamed-militia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=9819","title":{"rendered":"The Well-Defamed Militia"},"content":{"rendered":"

The arrests of nine “[insert inflammatory catchphrase here]”<\/span> “Christian Militia” members in Michigan have focused America’s attention<\/span> the American media and those who still pay attention to it on the “problem” of “militias” which, by the way, have been shrinking since their heyday in the 1970s through early 1990s.<\/p>\n

During the 90s, “militias” became the Democrat boogeyman, after a number of well-publicized and very ugly incidents; the Medina shootout<\/a>, the Ruby Ridge massacre, and of course the Oklahoma City bombing.\u00a0 Under fire during his first term before his epic setback in the ’94 elections, the Clinton Administration sought to distract the nation with a huge, sinister, conspiratorial internal enemy, the “militia movement”; the 1994 Crime Bill, larded with civil rights violations that dwarfed much of what had the left up in arms during the Bush administration, was at least partly in response to this huge “movement”…<\/p>\n

…that, except for the actions of Timothy McVeigh (who, says the government, was not <\/em>acting as part of a huge shadowy conspiracy), had almost no affect on crime or any other area of life in the US – certainly not as compared to the “war on drugs”, which was a product of a perfect storm of social engineering from both the right (“drugs are bad”) and the left (decades of welfare dependence and warehousing the poor in the inner city).<\/p>\n

At any rate, even though the numbers of people involved in the lefty boogeyman version of “militias” was never big, and has dropped since the nineties, the image that the left propagates – paunchy, hate-clogged, drawling, \u00a0white rednecks in camouflage with AK-47s – is a control panel full of hot buttons for the left, purpose-designed to scare – is back, for the moment at least, bigger and badder than ever.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Because with a Tea Party afoot across the land and the President’s poll numbers falling faster than Hillary Duff’s career bell curve, there are lots of center-to-left voters to be scared back into line.<\/p>\n

And fear’s first cousin is ignorance.\u00a0 I’m getting deja vu<\/em> all over again from the comments, the blog posts, the talk show calls; the left is duly frightened of the great, unwashed horde (and the tiny, unconvicted band that was the excuse for the left to declare “militias” the boogeyman of the month again).\u00a0<\/p>\n

It reminds me of something I wrote two years ago about the 25th anniversary of the Medina Shootout, and Hollywood’s reflections on all those crazy people between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre:<\/p>\n

But the Hollywood take on the area, and the locals, was bemusingly warped.\u00a0 Part of it was the Central Casting version of small-town people; although North Dakota is a place where you can <\/em>hear the Fargo <\/em>accent (\u201dYah, sure, you betcha\u201d) in a hundred little main street cafes and bars, the show had the local farmers speaking with cornpone Arklahoma drawls.\u00a0 The locals, to Hollywood, were out of Gomer Pyle <\/em>or, given the sinistry of the subject matter, maybe Deliverance<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Worse?\u00a0 While there was support for Kahl (and even more criticism of the Feds\u2019 heavy-handedness, arrogance, and occasional contempt for due process in the way they carried out the manhunt in the immediate wake of the shootout), Manhunt in the Dakotas <\/em>showed something that was almost an active guerilla movement, with rocks and shots aimed at passing police cars, threats, Gross (and Larry Hunt as \u201cChief Walters\u201d, a composite and sympathetic Jamestown police chief) being harrassed while driving in the countryside, and \u2013 in the movie\u2019s climactic scene \u2013 the two walking, nervous, down \u201cJamestown\u201d\u2019s main street as the \u201clocal radio station\u201d played the pro-Kahl song (with a cheery intro from the DJ), both of them keenly aware of the hateful gazes of the locals (by now all of them seemingly Kahl-sympathizers)\u00a0boring through them both, as if they were fully-bedsheeted Klansmen scurrying through Compton.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was nonsense, of course – and, like the “militia” mania that served to distract parts of America from Bill Clinton’s foibles, and is being rolled out now to distract us from Obama’s economy, and scare “moderates” into line behind The One, it’s a cynical lie.<\/p>\n

More tomorow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The arrests of nine “[insert inflammatory catchphrase here]” “Christian Militia” members in Michigan have focused America’s attention the American media and those who still pay attention to it on the “problem” of “militias” which, by the way, have been shrinking since their heyday in the 1970s through early 1990s. During the 90s, “militias” became the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,22,100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-slander-files","category-victim-disarmament","category-your-papers-please"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9819"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9827,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9819\/revisions\/9827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}