Hateland

by Daryl Johnson

  In 1965, the Watts riots in Los Angeles, initiated by alleged police brutality after officers pulled over an African American motorist, had totally overwhelmed the Los Angeles Police Department. To restore order, thousands of National Guardsmen were deployed. Even then, the riots lasted five days and resulted in thirty-four fatalities.

  Afterward, police in Los Angeles began looking for solutions to extraordinary circumstances like urban unrest, mass shooters, and armed extremist groups like the Black Panthers. A new select group of volunteer officers was put under command of Inspector Daryl Gates to receive additional training in Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT). In 1968, the new police unit was granted extraordinary powers by the California legislature, but it wasn't until December 9, 1969—two days after Fred Hampton's shooting—that the new SWAT teams saw their first significant deployment.

  Forewarned by the Chicago attack, the LA branch of the BPP was well-prepared for a police raid on its own headquarters. They turned their house into a fortified bunker with sandbags against walls and a supply of tear gas masks, as well as a well-stocked arsenal. Party members had even spotted the initial police approach on their house and shot and wounded three cops, who were dragged away by their fellow officers. But no one could have expected what happened next.

  The raid turned into a long-running shootout in a crowded urban neighborhood. Streets were shut down. Gates eventually called the Pentagon to get approval to use a grenade launcher. To cordoned-off bystanders, it looked like Vietnam had come home. As a tank was preparing for a final assault on their house, the Black Panthers surrendered.

  Party members were acquitted of the most serious charges brought against them, including attempted murder of police officers; the jury found they had acted in self-defense. Nonetheless, the high-profile use of SWAT units, who replaced standard-issue six-shot revolvers with submachine guns, tanks, and grenade launchers, provided a militarized policing model the rest of the nation soon followed.

  In 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover declared that the Black Panther Party was “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”5 Over the next few years, the bureau launched an extensive, and sometimes illegal, effort to infiltrate the group, harass and publicly humiliate members, and incite violence between the Black Panthers and other black militant groups and street gangs.

  After only a few years of the program, known as COINTELPRO, many BPP leaders were either dead, imprisoned, or in exile, and the party itself was splintered by power struggles and paranoia stoked by FBI informants and forged letters. Black militant extremist activity dropped off sharply after the early 1970s. However, the use of militarized police tactics had only just begun.

  Beginning in the 1970s, the use of SWAT teams rapidly grew as part of President Richard Nixon's war on drugs. In 1972, police launched a few hundred SWAT-led paramilitary raids across the United States. By the early 1980s, there were three thousand such raids annually.

  The 1981 Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act furthered the link between policing and the military by providing military intelligence and weapons to local law enforcement. As Michelle Alexander wrote in The New Jim Crow, that legislation made official the ongoing transformation of police operations by carving “a huge exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, the Civil War-era law prohibiting the use of the military for community policing.”6

  In preparation for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Mayor Tom Bradley authorized Daryl Gates, by then chief of the LAPD, to round up all known and suspected gang members and hold them until the conclusion of the games. Despite the measure's likely intrusion on habeas corpus rights—most of the detainees were never charged—those types of sweeps continued to be used by the LAPD. Both the militarization of police and the holding of people on suspicion of crime troubled some civil liberties advocates but, largely because the tactics were deployed against poor and mostly African American and other minority groups, there was not a huge public backlash.

  Nonetheless, African Americans’ widespread sense of being under siege by an unjust use of law enforcement continued to stoke a kind of righteous anger similar to what Aaron Dixon felt when he joined the Black Panther Party. In some cases, such as the rioting following the acquittal of police officers filmed beating black motorist Rodney King, this hostility toward law enforcement expressed itself as destructive rage.

  But in other cases, the combination of poverty, lack of future prospects, anger, and grievance created fertile ground for new cases of radicalization. In 1997, for example, the shooting of a mentally unstable African American man in Watts energized the creation of the Black Riders Liberation Party, a Black Nationalist and anti-capitalist group. Two other extremist groups, the New Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton Gun Club, emerged in the public outrage that followed police shootings of black men. By 2015, these groups’ hate-filled extremism was available to everyone online. Among others, Micah Johnson visited their website prior to killing five Dallas police officers. The websites alone didn't cause his violence, but they certainly played a role in his choice of targets.

  The continued use of the aggressive, militarized law enforcement techniques first tested on the left-wing Black Panthers in the 1960s had a less likely impact nearly thirty years later: inspiring a massive wave of mostly white and right-wing paramilitary militias.

  The aggressive response to a weapons charge at Ruby Ridge was based on tactics first used against the Black Panther Party and largely African American rioters in the 1960s. In the form of drug raids, the same tactics had been disproportionately used against people of color throughout the 1970s and 80s. But after those tactics resulted in the death of two white survivalists, outrage spread among a certain subsection of right-wing extremists. John Trochmann, a forty-eight-year-old veteran of the white supremacist movement centered in Noxon, Montana, in the 1980s, called for “private citizen armies” to defend local communities from out-of-control law enforcement. Trochmann's reaction to perceived police harassment was essentially the Black Panther model relocated from the inner city to small town America.

  The aggressive law enforcement efforts at the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas—which also had their genesis in the militarized assault on the LA-based BPP's compound—further ratcheted up right-wing extremist paranoia and hostility. Like inner-city African Americans, many rural whites felt like they were under attack by an unjust government that was always on the verge of suspending habeas corpus and imprisoning Americans without due process. The resulting atmosphere, full of anger, paranoia, grievance, and a desire for revenge created the sort of external forces that encouraged the radicalization and the emergence of the 1990s Patriot and militia movements—as well as the Black Riders Liberation Party and Huey P. Newton Gun Club.

  The paranoia of right-wing militias and Patriot groups in the early 1990s was also heightened by the successful passage of two gun control measures, the so-called Brady Bill, which created a five-day waiting period on purchases, the other a ban on certain assault rifles. For people already expecting the federal government to strip constitutional protections, this confirmed their worst fears.

  What's more, the high-powered weapons now available to militarized law enforcement convinced militias and Patriot groups that not only did they need guns to stave off the encroaching feds, they couldn't protect their freedoms with anything less than an AR-15.

  In a 1994 feature for Guns & Ammo magazine titled “Freedom's Last Stand—Are You Willing to Fight for Your Guns?,” the author declared, “We cannot hope to prevail against a tyrannical government armed with fully automatic weapons when we are reduced to bolt actions or worse.”7 Militias were spurred into an arms race with increasingly militarized law enforcement.

  Radicalization across the political spectrum starts with a combination of psychological factors and external radicalizing factors like ideologies, activities, and leaders. So, ultimately, it's not really that surprising that some ideologically opposed extremist groups overlapped at places.
In this case, both the Communist, black militant Black Panther Party of the 1960s and 70s and the right-wing extremist militias of the 1990s shared an angry and violent distrust of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. A perception of injustice and persecution fueled their respective movements. There were, however, groups that even more steadfastly opposed not just law enforcement, but the legitimacy of government at all.

  Posse Comitatus is a case in point. An anti-Semitic, white supremacist ideology born in California but formalized in Portland, Oregon, Posse Comitatus's adherents claimed that no citizen has to submit to any authority higher than a county sheriff, vehicle registration is illegal, and paying taxes is sinful.

  The movement spread slowly across the country during the 1970s, then took off by recruiting victims of the 1980s farm crisis. People devastated by the loss of their farms were particularly susceptible to false claims that the catastrophe was the result of hidden forces such as leaving the gold standard, Jewish bankers, or the Jewish-controlled Federal Reserve.

  After an early 1980s explosion in membership and violence, many of the leaders of Posse Comitatus groups were arrested, imprisoned, or killed in shootouts with law enforcement by the end of the decade. However, the movement's anti-government message and embrace of violent resistance didn't fade with the eclipse of Posse Comitatus itself.

  In mid-afternoon on August 19, 1997, New Hampshire state trooper Scott Phillips pulled over a pickup truck at an IGA supermarket in the tiny town of Colebrook. Phillips knew the driver, sixty-two-year-old Carl Drega, was a bit of a nutcase. He was sure Drega wouldn't be happy to be informed his vehicle was too rusty for the road. But, still, Officer Phillips didn't expect Drega to pull out an AR-15.

  Phillips escaped to a nearby field and fired back, but Drega—who had the more powerful weapon—followed and killed him. Drega then shot and killed another state trooper, Leslie Lord, who had followed the men into the field.

  Drega walked back to Phillip's cruiser and drove over to the offices of the Colebrook News and Sentinel. Vickie Bunnell, a lawyer and judge who shared offices with the newspaper, had been terrified of Drega for years. When she saw Drega coming toward the building this time, Bunnell jumped up and yelled: “It's Carl! He's got a gun! Get out!”8

  Bunnell fled out the back door, but Drega still managed to kill her, shooting from about thirty feet away. He also killed a newspaper editor who tried to tackle him.

  Drega hopped back in the cruiser and drove to his house, which he burned to the ground. He then put on Phillips's hat and drove across the nearby Connecticut River into Vermont. Fish and conservation officer Wayne Saunders recognized Phillips's car and thought it had been dumped in the woods after some kids took it for a joy ride. But as Saunders approached, Drega began firing. One of his rounds struck Saunders's badge, fragmenting into shrapnel that went into his shoulder and arm.

  Drega fled back into New Hampshire, where he waited to ambush the other officers in pursuit. He wounded two more state troopers and a border patrol agent before being shot dead.

  On one hand, this was the bloody saga of a loner who cracked. But there was a telling backstory to Drega's rampage. Twenty-five years earlier, in 1972, Drega's wife had died from cancer on the same day he was scheduled to appear before the local council, the Columbia Board of Selectmen, to discuss permitting for a barn he was building on his riverfront property. Some in the community thought he blamed the selectmen for her death. Whatever the case, that incident presaged a long history of paranoia and animosity toward any kind of legal authority.9

  After being told the soil he'd dumped on the shoreline in front of his house was changing the river's course, Drega took a fish and conservation officer to court. Years later, when a tax accessor visited his property, Drega came out armed, ordered him to leave, and impounded his car. When Selectman Bunnell arrived to deal with the situation, Drega fired shots over both their heads. Paranoid, Drega always carried a rifle to get his mail. After his death, a search of the burnt remains of his property found a large stash of ammunition and explosives. And while Drega had no known association with extremist groups, he had signed correspondence as a “Sovereign Citizen.”

  Speaking about the shooting twenty years later, fish and game officer Kevin Jordan remembered, “We all thought he was a joke.”10 And, although Sovereign Citizens are well known to harass, and sometimes attack, lawyers, law enforcement, tax collectors, and other public officials, their bizarre ideology sounds comical at first.

  A loosely organized group of individuals, Sovereign Citizens believe that all forms of state and federal government are illegitimate. The endless and convoluted pseudo-legalese that supports these beliefs is a combination of unconventional theories cobbled together from the Magna Carta, Bible, English common law, various nineteenth-century state constitutions, and the US Constitution, among other sources.

  Take their claims that the traditional responsibilities of citizenship don't apply to them, which stretch credulity to the breaking point. For example, the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted slaves full citizenship rights, reputedly also created a separate “corporate” United States, with jurisdiction restricted to Washington, DC, Guam, Puerto Rico, and other federal enclaves like military bases and Native American reservations. The people born in those areas are called “Fourteenth Amendment citizens” and have to follow federal laws. Everyone born outside of federal authority is a “freeman” or “natural-born person” and not subject to US, or state, laws.

  Sovereign Citizens also argue that the only true form of government is “de jure,” or one comprised of the American people and inspired by God. What are generally considered the legitimate US and state governments are regarded as “de facto,” fraudulent, man-made institutions and codes that don't apply to freemen. In short, as a Sovereign Citizen, Drega would have believed that permits, building codes, vehicle inspections, conservation officers, judges, lawyers, selectmen, and police officers were all harassing manifestations of an illegitimate government bent on enslaving him. Note that all Drega's targets—save the newspaper editor who tried to tackle him—were representatives of the legal system and law enforcement whose authority he refused to recognize.

  Drega, it needs to be noted, was something of an outlier among Sovereign Citizens. Rather than violent insurrection, most adherents were involved in white-collar scams, like offering reputedly legal ways of escaping taxes, zoning ordinances, or other claims against them.

  They might, for example, explain to clients that signing their name on any legal documents—contracts, social security cards, driver's licenses—meant accepting enslavement to federal laws. If they do sign such documents, Sovereign Citizens often insert inappropriate grammatical marks, like “Doe; John”—and then claim that, legally, this person is not the “John Doe” created by the government. Sovereign Citizens may also offer “asseveration” documents to liberate clients from federal and state laws and claims, returning them to their natural state.

  In court, Sovereigns also often play with the formal elements of language as part of their defense. “Sovereigns believe,” notes the SPLC, “that if they can find just the right combination of words, punctuation, paper, ink color and timing, they can have anything they want—freedom from taxes, unlimited wealth, and life without licenses, fees or laws, are all just a few strangely worded documents away.”11

  In one criminal case heard in US district court, for example, judges noted that the defendant and other Sovereign Citizens were “fascinated by capitalization. They appear to believe that capitalizing names have some sort of legal effect.” The court added that the defendant “appears to believe that by capitalizing ‘United States,’ he is referring to a different entity than the federal government. For better or for worse, it's the same country.”12

  But no matter how invalid their arguments are, courts often puzzle over exactly how to deal with the nonsense. In that case, the court “feels some measure of responsibility to inform Defendant that all the fancy legal-
sounding things he has read on the internet are make-believe.”13

  Sovereign Citizen gurus have also organized seminars, charging up to $1,000 or more per person, to demonstrate how to file a phony Corporation Sole. Participants are manipulated into believing that their counterfeit Corporation Sole provides a “legal” way to avoid paying income taxes, child support, and other personal debts by hiding their assets in a tax-exempt entity.

  Like their ideological forebears in the Posse Comitatus, many Sovereign Citizens are white supremacists and anti-Semitic. More than a few have resorted to violence. But at the core of Sovereign Citizens’ beliefs is a deep disparagement of any kind of legal entity or law enforcement. And this turned out to be a quality that made Sovereign Citizen ideology attractive to a wider circle of people, including African Americans.

  In the early twentieth century, African Americans began to move in large numbers from the South to escape oppressive racism and get better paying jobs. The migration created a higher standard of living for many, but moving away from family in the rural South to factory jobs in the Northeast and Midwest left many African Americans stressed, frustrated, and confused about who they were.

  In 1913, one of these Southern transplants, calling himself Noble Drew Ali, founded the Moorish Science Temple of America in the booming industrial town of Newark, New Jersey. Drew's religion was based on a wide-ranging syncretism, including a reputedly lost section of the Koran and a description of Jesus's travels in India, Egypt, and Palestine during the years not accounted for in the Bible. Drew also claimed that African Americans are descendants of the biblical Moabites and should be called “Moors” as opposed to Black, Colored, or Negro. His mysticism and Moorish pride appealed to many of the immigrants lost in a strange industrial environment.