Jesse Walker, managing editor of Reason magazine, discusses the lack of compelling evidence so far against the Hutaree militia members, the distinction between tough talk and actual criminal conspiracy, how most militias are formed for defensive action against government abuses and why unique personal grievances tend to make anti-government violence the domain of individuals acting alone.
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For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest on the show today is Jesse Walker.
He's the managing editor of Reason Magazine and Reason.com.
And he's the author of Rebels on the Air, an alternative history of radio in America.
It's been quite a few years now, but that's a hell of a great read right there.
Although, where's my chapter, Jesse?
What's up?
Hey, welcome to the show.
I'm glad to be here.
If I ever do a sequel, I will make it all about you.
Well, chaos deserves a paragraph in there somewhere anyway.
Never mind me.
I don't want to talk about pirate radio.
I want to talk on pirate radio about the myth of the menacing militias.
Think the Hutteri are the leading edge of a vast new paramilitary threat?
Asks the sub-headline of your article here at Reason.com.
And my answer is yes, I saw all about it on MSNBC.
I'm terrified.
Well, you do not need to be terrified.
There's really two questions about this whole Hattari case.
And we'll take them separately.
One of them is the question of how much of a threat was this specific group, which was kind of a screwed up group, no matter whether they were a threat or not.
There were some definite funny ideas in there.
And the other one is whether or not this was a seriously intended plot.
Is there this vast new militia or revived militia menace to public order out there in the fever swamps that we all need to be worried about?
And the answer to the first question is so far we have not seen a good reason to believe that anything was going to come of the alleged Hattari plot.
Now, I say so far because you don't know what will come out at trial.
I'm being very careful not to over-speculate beyond the evidence, as I think some of the people commenting on the case have done.
But it's been sort of a Keystone Cops caper.
You had the agent being questioned by the judge during the hearing over whether or not they would be released on bond, pending their trial, and the defendant, that is.
And the person said, well, actually, I haven't reviewed my notes recently.
I can't answer that question.
So there are problems like that.
But more important, if you look at what the government has released so far, it's very hard to say that this is evidence of a plot as opposed to evidence of people just shooting the breeze and beating their chest about how they'd like to kill some cops.
And I don't want to be glib about this.
They've released the transcript and the recording that their informant recorded of them all talking about ways they could kill cops.
It is possible that they will then have a follow-up recording brought out at trial where they say, now let's get down to brass tacks.
This is what we're going to do.
But as far as what happens in this particular recording, it's basically a bunch of people giggling and talking about different ways they could kill cops and how that will then lead to the revolution, man, because then everyone will start killing cops and no one will want to be a cop and there will be no more cops.
But they come up with all these.
I mean, they're really just peppering out ideas one after the other.
Some of them really far-fetched.
I mean, the one that got a lot of – that gets played up in the indictment is this idea of they kill a cop and then a bunch of them come to the funeral and they can throw explosives at their cars as they go by.
And again, maybe there's a later conversation where they say, all right, this is our plan.
This is what we're going to do.
But in context here, this is just one of these ideas that they're throwing out.
The whole thing – I mean, not that they are joking, because they are.
This is their political point of view.
But the whole thing could – it feels at times like a Phil Hendry or a Fireside Theater routine.
I kept flashing back to that Fireside Theater record where the guy is like, hey, hate cops.
I want to kill every stinking cop in this city.
I mean, it's very goofy.
I could imagine, in fact, the thing going online as sort of an amateurish podcast, which kind of gets to how incriminating people feel it is.
So we can wait for other evidence to come out.
But, I mean, when the judge in the case, when she was deciding and ruled that they should be released on bond, that they were not such a threat that it was – police would be in danger of being killed if they're put under house arrest under these very stringent conditions rather than being kept in jail pending their trial.
But she said there is a right to engage in hate-filled speech.
The First Amendment protects that.
And you've got to demonstrate that there's a plot here and not just people talking and not just loose talk.
So we will see.
And there are other open questions about the case.
Well, in fact, when you talk about loose talk, the talk can even be kind of tight.
I remember hearing – I've mentioned this before on the show.
Sorry to repeat myself, but this will be the first time I've talked with you about this.
I heard Howard Stern interview G. Gordon Liddy, and he said, all right, so tell me all about your different plots to murder John Anderson, the newspaper man you didn't like.
And Gordon Liddy said, oh, yeah, we sat around and talked about, well, maybe we could do piano wire around the neck or maybe we could blow up his car or maybe we could put cyanide in his Tylenol bottle.
We decided against that because he had a wife and a kid and we didn't want them to accidentally eat the cyanide.
And so here – he's not some huddering militia nut.
He's G. Gordon Liddy, the G-man, the guy who goes murdering people for the state when they need them murdered and whatever.
And here he's perfectly willing to talk on the radio about open discussions, about different ways that they could murder someone.
And he explained to Howard Stern – and he's a lawyer, too, former special agent.
He knows what he's talking about.
He says, listen, this is all perfectly fine.
The problem only comes when I say, OK, I'm going to get the cyanide.
I'll meet you there and we'll put it in his Tylenol bottle.
Now you've engaged in a conspiracy to commit murder.
And I mean the Jack Anderson case.
I mean I hate to use G. Gordon Liddy as a case of virtue there, but it certainly does get to this other issue, which is that there's a lot of attention focused on the alleged threat coming up from people out on the fringes when in fact you hear the same sort of thing often within the corridors of power.
And sometimes these discussions of public fear, it's as though they can't conceive of why somebody would be so afraid of the government that they end up in a militia in the first place.
Well, stories like G. Gordon Liddy talking about how they might kill Jack Anderson is the kind of thing that sometimes has people on that road.
He's not the example of virtue.
He's the example of the scum of the earth who still is not prosecutable for that.
I'm just in case anyone listening misunderstands.
The point is he's not in prison for conspiring to kill Jack Anderson because the conversation that he loves to repeat out loud about conspiring to kill Jack Anderson wasn't quite a conspiracy.
It was tossing around open ideas about what they might do.
That's all and that's perfectly legal in the United States of America.
So there's more than one issue here.
In fact, I said two issues.
There's three issues.
One is the issue of did they break the law?
Next is the issue of if they didn't break the law, were they really a threat or was this a case of the government acted too soon?
If they waited, they would have had a plan.
Well, there's a question of entrapment in there too.
And that's something that's just speculative.
There's a question of entrapment too, isn't there, Jesse?
Well, that's one of the things that I'm waiting to find out about.
Because there have been a lot of cases where the government's agents have proposed the plans.
That was certainly the case in a number of the militia, the Viper Team case in the 1990s.
It's been the case with some of these Muslim terrorists or alleged terrorists that have been brought up on trial in the last decade.
In this case, we don't know who the informant is, or if you do know, please tell me.
I've been watching very hard for any sign of that, because there's been a lot of speculation to that effect.
And we don't know.
I mean, just in the conversation that was released, the leader of the group, David Stone, is the one who is bringing up most of these ideas.
So he's certainly the one who brings up the idea that gets mentioned in the indictment.
And I don't think the leader of the group will turn out to be the informant within the group, although that would be very interesting were the case.
But what we certainly could see is that if there is more to this case than just some people sitting around and shooting the breeze about how they'd like to kill some cops and ways you can do it, it will be interesting to find out who's the one who says, all right, now we're going to do this, and I will help you learn how to do this with an explosive and so on.
Oh, by the way, just as a side point, we've reached a point now where in indictments, simple explosives are being described as weapons of mass destruction.
I mean, it was just a few years ago, I remember us joking about, oh, it's going to be, they'll be saying mustard gas is a weapon of mass destruction.
There was a time when that meant nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons.
Under the new definition, they did find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the IEDs.
This sort of rhetorical excess is part of the way that the fear of these groups is being pumped up.
And I've only got a few more minutes.
I want to get to that larger issue of the so-called militia menace.
It's important to understand several things about the Hotari.
Number one, a lot of the other militias don't like them.
The dominant militia in Michigan, the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia, has a history of not getting along with them.
A sociologist who's been, and we're not saying this just based on the militia men's own word, trying to distance themselves from this group, which they've done.
But also, I mean, a sociologist who spent the last two years studying the militia movement in Michigan and hanging out with these people and talking with them.
I mean, I've talked to her, other reporters have talked to her, and she has said, yeah.
When I first joined, I mean, not joined, first started talking with these members of the Southeast Volunteer Michigan Militia, they told me these stories about these crazy guys who didn't know how to handle their weapons well, and they came to train with them once, and they said, please don't come back.
They kept open the lines of the discussion, but that was basically to keep an eye on them.
And there's some reporting in the Detroit papers which says that perhaps it was these other militia men that put the FBI on the Atari in the first place.
So far from this sort of vast, I mean, there are other militia groups, some very small ones that do get along with them to various degrees.
I mean, there's a full spectrum of opinion.
But it's pretty clear that far from being a sign of this sort of army of militia men out in the swamps, what we're seeing is a very divided milieu of people who believe that other militia men could be more of a threat than the state that they were other times organizing against.
I mean, there's also, there's precedent for this.
In the 90s, there weren't many genuine terror plots associated with militias.
Timothy McVeigh was not in a militia.
Most of the ones that there were, there was an informant involved coming up with the idea.
But in general, by the most generous definition of militia, there were about a dozen.
They generally involved splinter groups that split off from larger militias.
And in at least three cases, they were prevented because other militia people who did not join the splinter group and thought those people were nuts and terrorists went to the police and said, hey, we got wind of a plot.
Well, let me ask you here, because I know you've got to go real soon, so I want to make sure that you can kind of work this into the rest of what you want to say about that.
And that is the question of, and people should know that managing editor of Reason Magazine, that means that as a good libertarian, you don't really have a dog in this fight left or right.
You're not a militia guy and you're not a Maddowite either.
You just, well, you've got Reason on your side here.
What do you think is the line, if there is one, that would have to be crossed for militia guys to actually grab their guns and start shooting government employees?
Do you mean what do I think?
Like, how bad would it have to be?
What would have to be happening to them for them to be what Maddow says they are?
Government employees, or are you asking when I think people in militias would say that it's time to start shooting government employees?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the Hattari, I mean, part of what that transcript that they had was them saying, everybody's got all these tripwires, like when the foreign troops get here, or if the government does this and such and such and so, and then they'll start firing, you know, if the U.N. sends troops.
And their argument is, hey, and I got to say, I mean, they actually, I'm not advocating violence, but in terms of just the way things work, they have a point.
They say the way things are enforced is the local PD comes out, and they're the ones that enforce a tax law or a lien on your property or a foreclosure or whatever it is they're upset about.
And that was their justification for killing local cops.
So, I mean, there's sort of what is on the one hand a more reasoned position about who enforces the rules in society led them to this more extreme position on, you know, who to go shooting.
Well, I guess what I'm getting at is the rest of the militia guys, the ones who call the FBI on these guys, it would have to be U.N. troops in their neighborhood or something for them to actually go.
I think that, I mean, it really varies from one to another.
But if there were sort of a mass gun confiscation, you know, that's always the first thing they will say.
They always sort of imagine themselves as using the weapons defensively.
I mean, that's another way that the Hattari type, I mean, the people who get into terrorism as a tactic are unusual.
It's that what people will generally say is that, I mean, you had like militia people showing up during the standoff with the Freeman in Montana in the mid-'90s, and not because they sympathized with the Freeman's point of view, but because they wanted to make, they were sort of, they were there to police the police in their perspective.
They felt that if the police started moving towards a Waco or Ruby Ridge approach to the situation, that's when they would be there to put up their gun and say, no, we're going to be defending these people.
So I hope that gets towards answering your question.
And it really depends, I mean, you know, there's, again, there's a whole spectrum of opinion.
I mean, the Hattari are on this very far end.
The other thing that's very important, it's not just they're unusual for being violent among these groups.
They're unusual for being a group among violent people.
I mean, most of the people that have gotten attention when people discuss anti-government violence, it's folks like Joe Stack, you know, I mean, like a single person who, through a mixture of motive, usually involving personal events rather than ideology, though they will pull things from different ideological sectors, right-wing, left-wing, just completely incoherent to defend what they do, is they will act alone.
And there's efforts then to turn this and say, well, the lone wolves are the threat, and some of the more sophisticated anti-militia people will focus on that, because they understand that's where the violence comes from.
But the problem is, it's completely disorganized violence.
You can talk all you want about leaderless resistance that's uncoordinated, but the fact is, yes, it's uncoordinated.
It's uncoordinated in large part because it's people who have different motives for what they're doing, different targets for what they're doing, and generally acting, not because they feel they're the leading edge of a revolution, but because something in their personal life has snapped.
I mean, there's that fellow, there was a good movie with Sean Penn playing him, the assassination of Richard Nixon.
Ultimately, it was because he'd been denied a small business association loan, but there were some other things mixed in, both personal and political.
You can point to people like that, but they don't add up.
You have to create this sort of elaborate pattern to link them that just isn't there.
I didn't get into this so much in that myth of the menacing militia story.
It might be a subsequent article, but that's the other way that this whole big conspiracy theory about the militia menace falls apart.
All right, well, listen, I know you've got to go, but I hope we can talk again soon.
All right, glad to be here.
Talk to you later.
Everybody, that is Jesse Walker, managing editor of Reason Magazine and Reason.com and the author of the book Rebels on the Air, an alternative history of radio in America.
And we'll be back on Chaos right after this.
