Thread by @egavactip

One of the historical questions related to extremism that I've pondered for years is the odd composition of white supremacy in the history of anti-government extremists over the past 50 years. I'll explain in this thread....

Leaving aside single issue movements, one of the best ways to visualize the extreme right in the U.S. is as two overlapping spheres, each consisting of a number of movements. One sphere consists of white supremacist movements, the other of anti-government extremist movements.

The two spheres have a fairly small amount of overlap. In the 1970s and 80s, the amount of overlap was far higher, but it began to decrease in the late 80s, a trend that continued for the decades afterwards. What I find so interesting is the identity of the white supremacists

in that overlap. Here I am talking about the tax protest and sovereign citizen movements in the 1970s and 80s and, to a lesser degree, the sovereign citizen and militia movements in the 1990s. When you examine the white supremacists in this overlap

what you predominantly see are adherents of the racist and anti-Semitic religious sect Christian Identity. If you look for it, it is possible to find other types of white supremacists--for example, Tom Metzger was a minor figure in the tax protest movement in the early 1970s--

But really, what you see over and over again is Christian Identity. William Potter Gale, Thomas Wickstrom, Gordon Kahl, Robert Wangrud, Leroy Schweitzer, Bruce McCarthy, Ardie McBrearty (I think), Red Beckman, Michael Hill, John Trochmann, Willie Ray Lampley, and so many others.

So why is this? That's the big question to me. Why so many C.I. adherents and not, say, neo-Nazis? I do have at least a partial theory. Christian Identity, though often mistakenly called "fundamentalist," is actually a sect whose beliefs depend heavily on what I would call

"manipulative interpretation" of texts, esp. the Bible. Rather than take the text of the bible literally, as fundamentalists would, C.I. adherents look for hidden or alternative meanings. For example, they might take a word in an English-language bible, then look at that same

word, and its various nuances and meanings in an ancient Greek or ancient Latin version of the scriptures, in order to choose a meaning from one of these languages that they might prefer in order to make a claim. Here's a common example of their textual revisionism:

I explain this because, as the tax protest and sovereign citizen movements evolved, their adherents began to do essentially the same thing--only with laws and legal texts rather than religious texts. So you can see how Christian Identity adherents, encountering this, would have

seen a methodology they were very familiar with and which perhaps increased the appeal of these anti-government movements for C.I. adherents. Indeed, some Christian Identity sovereign citizen adherents--LeRoy Schweitzer, the Montana Freeman leader, is a good example here--pretty

freely mixed and intermingled religious and legal notions and terms in their presentations and writings. And once C.I. has a beachhead in these movements, that helps other C.I. adherents join. Now, the militia movement is a somewhat special case. It comes around decades later

than the other movements, and is far less interested in textual revisionism as well. By the time the militia movement emerged, Christian Identity had already diminished as a proportion of anti-gov't extremist movements, as they brought in so many non-C.I. people over the years.

The militia movement, when it does emerge, also brings in a large number of newly-radicalized people, with no previous associations with extremism, and few of these are white supremacists. As a result, though one can find C.I. in the early militia movement (such as the Militia of

Montana, or some of the Wickstrom adherents in the Michigan Militia), even at the beginning it is rarer than it was for the other two movements, and the proportion quickly decreases as the movement grows. By the time of the revival of the militia movement in 2008-2010 after a

steep decline in the 2000s, Christian Identity in the movement became pretty rare. By this time, too, Christian Identity itself was beginning to experience a significant decline as so many of its long-influential leaders had died off.