Soon, Moorish churches sprang up in every city with large African American populations—New York, Detroit, and Washington, DC, among them. By the 1930s, Drew had gained thousands of adherents, but his religion's greatest influence was on two other African American groups.
The first, and most direct, began when a Moorish leader named Wallace Fard Muhammad left the Moorish Temple in Chicago and began preaching his own syncretic brand of Islam in Detroit. His organization, also aimed at newly arrived African American migrants, became known as the Nation of Islam.
The second, and much less predictable, reemergence of Moorish thinking began in the 1990s when some of the religion's terms and ideas combined with Sovereign Citizens’ philosophy. From Moorish Science came the idea that African Americans are of Moorish ancestry, primarily from an enlarged Moroccan Empire. (Moorish adherents often use “Bey” or “El” in their names to represent rejection of their slave names.)
From Sovereign Citizens came other pseudo-legal justifications that African Americans constituted an elite class within American society and are beyond federal and state authority.14 In addition to traditional claims concerning a repudiation of the illegitimate “de facto” federal and state government—as well as their laws, taxes, ordinances, permits, licensing, and so on—Moorish Sovereigns claim they were given special rights because of a 1778 treaty between the United States and Morocco.
While embracing descent from African “Moors,” Moorish groups also sometimes claim to be indigenous to the Americas. In fact, one of the earliest groups to merge Moorish Science and Sovereign Citizen ideas was the “Washitaw Nation,” whose Empress Verdiacee Turner Goston asserted that Moors are the rightful owners of all lands ceded to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase.15 She also claimed that the Washitaw Nation occupies the fictitious United Nations Indigenous People's Seat 215.
Beyond the grand claims to land and titles, much of the day-to-day work of Moorish Sovereigns closely resembled that of their white counterparts. They offered training seminars that taught legal financial scams and methods to avoid paying taxes. They sold a wide variety of bogus legal documents and permits such as fake license plates and counterfeit passports.16 Some particularly bold members occupied expensive, empty houses, presenting fake ownership deeds when questioned. On occasion, they have also been involved in violent encounters with law enforcement.
Moorish Sovereigns occupy a unique space in the extremist universe. They find common ground with black nationalists in their promotion of African American heritage and identity. Some Moors claim the middle third of the country, while black separatists often claim a large part of the southern United States as a homeland. On the other hand, they've never formed a mass movement with specific demands, and their bizarre legalese is directly descended from white supremacists.
By 2007, the Patriot movement was still a shadow of its former self, and black nationalists hadn't been a major threat for over thirty years. But this silence wouldn't last much longer. The deep inventory of fear, paranoia, and hate directed at the government, particularly its law enforcement and legal system, was about to erupt again. First the militias and Sovereign Citizens and, later, black militant groups—extremists whose heydays had been separated by decades—all saw historic increases in activity. Between 2008 and 2016, it was as if the preceding four decades of anti-police extremism had been condensed into a much smaller time and space.
But not only were all these extremist actors in play at once, these groups were also re-emerging into a country where politics, media, and even intrapersonal relationships were now processed through a web-enabled, hyper-partisan, outrage-fueled, troll-driven, click-hungry, conspiracy-laced, all-immersive media culture. This time, any actions—even peaceful ones—ricocheted rapidly around the media ecosystem, creating a uniquely American conflagration.
April 19, 2009: A Yale-educated lawyer in his thirties looked out from a small wooden podium on the village green in the center of Lexington, Massachusetts. There were under a few hundred people in attendance, but forty-three-year-old Elmer Stewart Rhodes could see a movement afoot. On the 234th anniversary of the first battles of the American Revolution—and the 14th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing—Rhodes had come to speak about the existential threats facing the country today. Under a cloudless sky, Rhodes warned the crowd that their freedoms existed on a knife's edge.
“You need to be alert and aware,” he warned, “to the reality of how close we are to having our constitutional republic destroyed.”1
Rhodes was a gun-rights columnist for SWAT magazine, a libertarian who had been a volunteer coordinator for Congressman Ron Paul. He was also a former army paratrooper injured during a night jump, a lawyer with a strong constitutionalist bent, and a devout Christian. Over the past year, he'd begun blogging about his concerns that the government was already eroding and, ultimately, dead set on extinguishing Americans’ constitutional rights.
His political message, spiced up with a few Bill Clinton jokes, resonated with many of the history buffs in attendance. Rhodes's politics could also be divined by some of the other notables in the crowd that day. One was former sheriff Richard Mack, whose refusal to enforce the Brady Bill waiting period for gun purchases made him a hero of Rhodes.
Another familiar face in the crowd was that of Mike Vanderboegh, a fifty-seven-year-old veteran of the 1990s militia movement. Following the 1993 Waco standoff, Vanderboegh had authored an article called “Strategy and Tactics for a Militia Civil War” in which he lauded snipers who could take out “enemy forces” such as law enforcement and the intelligence groups tracking the militia movement.
Schisms let loose by the Oklahoma City bombing had weakened the militia movement, and George W. Bush's presidency had sent it into steep decline, but by 2009, the militia movement was back, and so was Vanderboegh. He founded a group called the Three Percenters (also styled 3%ers, III%ers or 3pers) who had vowed to resist gun laws—violently, if necessary.
His group was based on the idea that, over two centuries earlier, only three percent of colonials had taken up arms against the British.2 But that small, dedicated group was able to force out the most powerful military in the world. Vanderboegh stood on the hallowed ground where Americans began their resistance against a mighty empire, ready to do so again—except this time the American government was the oppressor.
On stage, Rhodes was lambasting the most recent threat to liberty: intelligence analysts at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Their just-released 2009 report had warned that a confluence of events, including an African American Democratic president, a weak economy, and the current high employment rate, could lead to a surge in right-wing extremism.
Like Washington Times columnist Michelle Malkin and multiple Republican politicians, Rhodes blasted the report as an attack on conservatives everywhere. “The No. 1 focus of DHS is not Islamic terrorists—it is me and you,” said Rhodes. “They will unleash the government against you, silence you and suppress you!”3
Rhodes's speech that day mostly stayed out of raging extremist territory. But the blog he'd posted when building his movement the previous year was riddled with conspiratorial thinking. Rhodes asked readers to imagine a scenario in which Hillary Clinton, whom he called “Herr Hitlery,” was elected in 2009. Soon thereafter, he predicted, a domestic terrorism incident would provide cover for her to push through a United Nations ban on firearms.4
Following that, “Hitlery declares that [militia members] are subject to secret military detention without jury trial, ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques, and trial before a military tribunal hand-picked by the dominatrix-in-chief herself. Hitlery then orders police, National Guard troops and active military to go house-to-house to disarm the American people and ‘black-bag’ those on a list of ‘known terrorists,’ with orders to shoot all resisters.”5 Rhodes's apocalyptic “imagination” spat out essentially the same scenario envisioned by militias and other extremists for decades, at least as far back as
The Turner Diaries.
By the time of his Lexington speech, Rhodes didn't have to worry about another President Clinton, but he didn't seem that convinced that an Obama presidency would be much better. On July 4, 2009, Rhodes publicly repeated his dire warning and laid out his action plan. The military veteran had long been intrigued by the notion that Hitler would have been stopped in his tracks if the German army and security forces had refused to cooperate. With what seemed to him the near inevitability of totalitarian intrusions on Americans’ constitutional rights, Rhodes presented a list of ten things his group of current and ex-military and law enforcement should swear to never do—even if commanded to do so by superiors. This promise became the raison d'etre for his group and inspired their name: the Oath Keepers.
Rhodes's orders to resist were largely based on conspiracy theories about fantastic federal overreach. For example, Oath Keepers vowed not to take part in unconstitutional activities such as forcing Americans into concentration camps, confiscating their guns, blockading cities, imposing martial law, or cooperating with foreign troops occupying the US.6
This list of ten “thou shalt not do” activities had a distinctly biblical tone to it, as well as echoing the number of Amendments in the Bill of Rights. It also struck a chord with many Americans. Within a few years, membership in the Oath Keepers was estimated at around thirty thousand.7
Other Patriot and militia groups saw dramatic rises in numbers at the same time, rivaling the original boom in militia activity in the 1990s. But the Oath Keepers was no 90s revival. Rhodes's new group weren't off-the-grid survivalists who flouted laws and ran drills in the woods to take on the military and ATF. The Oath Keepers were the military and law enforcement, or at least former members of. Though embedded in organizations based on rigid chain of command, they followed a higher order. Starting in 2008, tens of thousands Oath Keepers—mostly retired or current law enforcement and military—had sworn allegiance to the organization, not to the government they were employed by. They were essentially making a promise to commit treason, if necessary.
Rhodes directed a particular degree of ire at DHS intelligence analysts’ suggestion that “disgruntled” veterans were potential future extremists.8 This wasn't a surprising stance for a veteran starting a group based around recruiting members of the military, although it failed to acknowledge that veterans returning from the frontlines had unleashed a disproportionate amount of extremist violence. But Rhodes was correct that, like the reaction to aggressive policing in the 1990s, the ongoing War on Terror was creating intense blowback.
While the lawyer was making his address in Lexington, Massachusetts, detainee 001 in the United States’ War on Terror was sitting in a cell in a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. John Walker Lindh, popularly known as the “American Taliban,” was a US-born convert to Islam who, in April 2001, volunteered to fight in Afghanistan for the Taliban against the Russian-backed Northern Alliance. A few months later, after the 9/11 terror attacks, the United States allied itself with the Northern Alliance and declared war on the Taliban.
In December 2001, Lindh was captured by the US military. His treatment was not exemplary, or even legal. He was held at a US Marine base in southern Afghanistan, where he was stripped, bound to a stretcher with duct tape, blindfolded, and left in a frigid shipping container. On other occasions, the FBI interrogated him without the presence of a lawyer, ignoring the Justice Department's ethics office recommendations.
As a result, the government, which had been determined to prosecute Lindh as a great victory for the legal system over terrorism, had to settle for a plea bargain. The Pentagon and White House did not want evidence of Lindh's torture to be presented as evidence in a courtroom. Instead, Lindh admitted that he had served as a soldier in Afghanistan, violated an economic sanction imposed by President Clinton, and that he had possessed rifles and grenades. He was also required to relinquish his claims of torture.
In 2003, another American citizen, José Padilla, was detained as an enemy combatant for three years in a military brig—a period of time that Padilla claimed included torture and that many experts claimed violated his constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure. In 2007, Padilla was finally convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and fund terrorism.
One might expect that there would be little sympathy on the extreme right for either man, both Muslim coverts. But for conspiracy theorists who already believed that 9/11 was a false flag that would be used to justify the imprisonment of innocent US citizens, the Lindh and Padilla stories were cautionary tales. As Americans deprived of due rights in the War on Terror and then given stiff sentences despite never having actually attacked any American targets, they gave some factual heft to rampant conspiracy theories.
The 2001 Patriot Act, which approved increased surveillance on American citizens by federal intelligence agencies, played into right-wing extremists’ fears and obsessions as well. The law was frequently seen as a harbinger of future limitless expansions of government power.
Meanwhile, revelations of the widespread use of torture on prisoners captured during the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan became valuable recruitment propaganda for both ISIS and al-Qaeda. The long-term US occupation of Iraq also created the overcrowded prisons where the local leadership of ISIS first met. The rapidly expanding jihadist use of the social media, which was pioneered by American companies, further inspired numerous lone-wolf domestic extremists in the United States. Muhammad Abdulazeez's attack on military targets was also the result of deadly US intervention in the Arab world that had dragged out for fourteen years at that point, more than half of his lifetime.
These attacks, in turn, convinced right-wing militias, and many mainstream Americans, that they needed weapons to keep themselves safe from an encroaching threat. After Abdulazeez's attack, for example, Oath Keepers urged members to serve as armed guards outside recruiting stations around the nation.
In short, the ongoing restrictions of civil liberties and jihadist domestic violence related to the War on Terror fueled right-wing paranoia toward both Islamic extremists and the US government, helping to ignite the explosion of violence that came to characterize the Obama years.
In Pinellas County, Florida, a dog license costs $20. If you are dedicated Sovereign Citizen, though, the amount doesn't matter. In 2010, Donna Lee Wray fought a protracted legal battle against a county prosecutor, filing ten Sovereign documents over two months to avoid paying for both the license and the $25 fee for not buying the license. This type of practice, sometimes referred to a “paper terrorism,” can be very effective. Finally, the prosecutor decided it wasn't worth the county's time and dropped the case.
For Sovereign Citizens, small victories like this only encourage them to protest other fees, fines, infractions, taxes, and even criminal proceedings. Sovereign Citizens have won multiple cases using Wray's method: swamping the legal system with a huge volume of legal nonsense.
As with other elements of extremism that emerged between 2008 and 2016, the internet and social media played a large part in the expansion of recent Sovereign Citizen activity. Today, thousands of websites and videos purport to offer fixes for everything from criminal charges to child support. But this pitch also found a large audience as a result of the prolonged recession following the 2008 financial crisis. The majority of new recruits were looking for a quick fix out of debt or foreclosures,9 and this appeal easily crossed racial lines. Despite the white-supremacist roots of the Sovereign movement, it spread rapidly through the African American Moorish community. Indeed, in multiple cities with large black populations—including Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia—African Americans comprise the majority of Sovereigns by 2016.10
Like white Sovereigns, the Moorish Sovereign ideology spread through Facebook and YouTube, but it also moved virally through a more traditional venue for criminal education: prisons across the country.
In one such case, a man named William Mitchell and his three co-
defendants each stood up in a federal courthouse in Baltimore during a preliminary hearing and repeated, “I am not a defendant, I do not have attorneys.”11 They explained that the court “lacks territorial jurisdiction over me”12 before wandering into the same speech about the Federal Reserve and gold standard.
Though the men refused to listen to their court-appointed lawyers, the stakes were incredibly high. The prosecution had a very strong case that could convict them of, among other crimes, weapons possession, drug dealing, and five counts of first-degree murder. A guilty verdict would likely lead to their execution.
Stymied by the men's reckless refusal to mount a real defense, the judge researched the case until he found the same language online linked to Sovereign Citizens. It turned out that Mitchell had learned Sovereign Citizen techniques from another prisoner, Michael Burpee, who had been transferred up from Ocala, Florida, on drug distribution charges. Burpee, also facing serious time, had picked up on the pseudo-legal scams from yet another prisoner in Florida. In Baltimore, Burpee taught other inmates the strategies, and the court was soon dealing with an influx of bizarre, amateur legal filings.
The amazing thing about the endless and nonsensical motions filed by Mitchell and his co-defendants is that the often unintelligible paperwork probably saved their lives. In cases where prosecutors are pushing for execution, even arguments that are ridiculous on their face need to be given weight because convictions risk being overturned upon appeal. When functioning properly, the justice system meets exacting standards and process. It's not designed to deal with a barrage of inexplicable garbage.
In a way, the court's dilemma applied to the wider rise of extremism between 2008 and 2016. Established systems, including media and other mainstream arbiters of truth, were simply not designed to deal with the massive amounts of untethered conspiracies, potentially ironic memes, and other indecipherable material that began shooting out of both subterranean message boards and mainstream social media.
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