by James A. Bacon
As conservative as I am, right-wing “militias” make me nervous. I’m sympathetic to some of what these citizen groups say they want to accomplish — keep neighborhoods safe, provide backup to local law enforcement in emergencies — but I don’t see why they need to parade around with guns to do that. I don’t hear sheriffs and police chiefs crying out for assistance from an armed citizenry.
A basic precept of any well-ordered society is that government maintains a monopoly on violence. Any other arrangement is an invitation to anarchy.
In an article describing the rise of self-described militias, Virginia Public Media highlighted the Virginia Kekoas, a militia group in Eastern Virginia that was formerly affiliated with the Bugaloo movement but broke away over disagreements with the Bugaloos’ white-supremacist ideology. Writes VPM:
Virginia-based militia members VPM News spoke with considered their activities legal and said they had organized primarily to protect themselves and their families from criminals, an overzealous federal government and natural disasters.
I distrust an “overzealous federal government,” too, but I’m not attending monthly meetings to conduct weapons training and learn how to patch up bullet wounds.
It’s a sad state of affairs.
Conservatives have been conditioned by decades of biased reporting to dismiss uncomfortable news stories emanating from VPM or other ruling-class media. That’s a dangerous instinct. One is certainly justified in applying a skeptical eye toward any reporting from regime media and asking how a particular story advances a left-wing narrative. But just because VPM reported something doesn’t necessarily make it wrong. Conservatives need to pay attention to the rise of armed militias.
The VPM bias is easily spotted, starting with the URL for the article: …/militia-paramilitary-election-violence-Virginia. That tips us off right away that someone at VPM equates self-described right-wing militias with paramilitary groups who potentially could engage in election violence, perhaps reminiscent of the Jan. 6 riot/insurrection. Such a message certainly aligns with the left/progressive trope that gun-bearing MAGA types are a threat to democracy.
Not surprisingly, VPM quotes several liberal/left “experts” who find the rise of right-wing militias to be alarming.
“When I hear a constitutional sheriff in a county of 20,000 is creating a posse of 150, I see that as ‘We’re here if you need us, Donald Trump,’” said Carolyn Gallaher, an American University professor who studies paramilitary movements in referring to a militia-friendly county not in Virginia. “The election is, in part, what they’re waiting for.”
The fears of Gallaher and others are entirely theoretical, not based on anything the Virginia “militia” groups have actually done. By contrast, none of these pundits evince the slightest concern with militant leftists, who may not parade around with AR-15s but have mastered the art of using low-level violence to intimidate others, especially in jurisdictions where they know sympathetic prosecutors will not charge them.
All that said, I still find it disconcerting to view photos of militia men posing in fatigues with semi-automatic weapons and spouting rhetoric that, though not advocating violence, hints that they would be willing to meet violence with violence if it came their way.
The VPM article opens with a description of Paul Voska, who was attending a gun show in Augusta County decked out in military fatigues. He has laid the groundwork, VPM says, to start a militia, which he sees as a liaison between city councils, police departments, and the people. In his vision, the militia would serve alongside the Virginia National Guard and law enforcement against “the evils of the world.”
“You have a police department that is corrupt and you have a local government that’s corrupt,” he says. “The militia being on the right side of the community, Constitution and established laws in this country would present a force or intimidation like, ‘Hey, listen, this ain’t right. Knock it off.”
Voska’s militia also would benefit the community through fundraisers and feeding the unhoused. “It’s just a bunch of guys who want to have their neighborhoods safe,” he said.
That doesn’t sound like a coherent mission. Portraying police departments and local governments as “corrupt” does not seem compatible with working with them against “the evils of the world.” Let me also suggest that a self-appointed and unaccountable militia is not a group I would want rendering judgment on constitutional and legal disputes and then telling people, “This ain’t right, knock it off.”
The article devotes additional space to the Virginia Kekoas group, which VPM says organized to protect themselves and their families from criminals, an overzealous federal government and natural disasters.
“You have to self-rescue. One of my mottos is that ‘nobody’s coming to save you,’ and you need to treat your life like that,” said Preacher, a member of Virginia Kekoas, identifying himself by his callsign.
Besides training once a month, the Virginia Kekoas travel to Richmond to participate in the annual gun-rights rally… bearing guns, of course.
“I just met you, and I would trust you more than any person who worked for the federal government — or state or local government, for that matter,” Preacher told VPM News. “And the reason I don’t trust the government is that I know what happens to populations who have been disarmed.”
Yes, it’s true, the Nazis and Communists disarmed their populations. It’s also true that armed militias brought total anarchy to places like Lebanon and Somalia.
VPM also quotes David Stanley, a former militia leader who trained members of the Hanover Patriots in his firearms school. During the George Floyd riots in 2020 the Hanover Patriots “set up a neighborhood watch on steroids.”
“What if the police department can’t show up? Or if they won’t show up? What if it’s just us — how do we keep some order?” Stanley asks.
“If a militia was called to, say, the starting of a riot, just the presence of armed men is a deterrent,” he said. “When they show up, you have local police, state police, sheriff’s department and 300 armed militia men standing on the streets. What’s gonna happen?”
I don’t know. Three hundred militia men could just as well prove to be an incitement to violence.
The right-wing militia men spend a lot of time fretting about worst-case scenarios. They’re the mirror image of their left-wing critics who live in dread of gun-toting right wingers installing Donald Trump as dictator for life.
What worries me is that sometimes worst-case scenarios can become self-fulfilling prophesies.
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