New Frontiers

CT: From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is “New Frontiers.” I’m Charlotte Tate, the Center’s associate director. In this episode, Mark Williams talks with sociologist Amy Cooter about the emergence, goals, and philosophies of American militia groups—and why their activities concern her as the next presidential election approaches.

Amy Cooter: Right now we see these groups as a whole as being relatively quiet, but the problem is they're paying very close attention to what is happening. With Trump, it would take really minimal effort to stir them back up again and so I personally am quite worried as we head into the next presidential election cycle.

Mark Williams: While the names Randy Weaver and David Koresh have receded into history, it was their armed standoffs with federal authorities that gave rise to America's modern militia movement. In the last few years, the militia's public visibility spiked, and some of their leaders have been prosecuted for the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol.

To get a better understanding of America's militia movement, I spoke with Professor Amy Cooter. Amy is Director of Research, Academic Development, and Innovation at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Her latest book is called Nostalgia, Nationalism, and the U.S. Militia Movement, and it's just been published by Routledge Press. Amy Cooter, welcome to “New Frontiers.”

Amy Cooter: Thank you for having me.

Mark Williams: Your research has been focused on militia movements in the United States and white supremacist movements. And it’s a really interesting topic and theme. I'm wondering how you first became interested in studying this topic in graduate school.

Amy Cooter: I feel like I should make up some story of a chance encounter in the woods or something. But the truth is, when I was an undergraduate in my social science classes, I just realized that it was an understudied topic. And that my background, coming from the rural South, could help provide some insights into those areas. And after I went to grad school in Michigan, I realized that militias were worthy of study on their own merits. I had initially intended to get into more extremist neo Nazi groups, but realized that militias were an important part of the picture and went from there.

Mark Williams: Did you see militia movements when you were growing up in Tennessee, or did you discover them when you got into graduate school?

Amy Cooter: It was somewhere in between. I wouldn't say that I saw many people I would consider, in retrospect, active militia members. But the culture's very similar. Lots of folks who hunt to put food on the table. People who shoot for target practice, various other things, and have a range of skepticism toward the government.

Mark Williams: Okay. I'm thinking about January 6th and the insurrection. And ever since that date, we have heard an awful lot about groups like the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers and so forth. Are these the types of groups or militias that you study? Are they pretty much the same or do they reflect important distinctions between different types of groups or militias?

Amy Cooter: Yes, those are the groups that I study, in addition to some other what I call community based militias that don't necessarily adopt some of the titles that we associate with the big national organizations like the Oath Keepers. There is a big range of both activity and ideology across these different groups. Some of them are more actively inclined, let's say to go after the government. Others are just more skeptical of the government–feel like they have to take a defensive stance. Some of them more clearly embrace overt racist principles or misogynistic principles, while others do not. And I think it's important to understand some of those differences so that we can know which groups are most worthy of our law enforcement attention and, at least hypothetically, understand how to intervene in some of their thought processes and negative action.

Mark Williams: Intrigued by what I was hearing, I wanted to know even more about these militia groups. What were they really like? What were their priorities? Their organizational structures? The major differences between them? And especially, what did Amy think about their future?

Amy Cooter: So with the Proud Boys in particular, I'll start there. I don't usually consider them so much within the militia sphere, even though there are overlaps, because they're more like a street fighting gang. They don't necessarily prioritize firearms in the same way that most militia groups do. However, they're very interested in violence, very interested in challenging the government and other certain authority structures in ways that those overlaps can exist. Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, we see them as a top down national organization that pulls different militia chapters, effectively, together, but sometimes that's more true than other cases because there are individual militia units that really follow that national framework and others that maybe adopt the name but don't really care what the national organization is doing. And then, especially since January 6th and the fallout from that, the arrest, the prosecutions, particularly of Stuart Rhodes, a lot of those more individual chapters have maybe continued their action, but many have disaffiliated from those particular names. So, we really think that the Oath Keepers in particular is done as we had formerly known it.

Mark Williams: You mention Stuart Rhodes. He was, for our listeners….

Amy Cooter: He was the very well-known leader of the Oath Keepers in particular. Took front and center stage, even before January 6th, for many people who were Imagining what the militia movement looked like even though there was this underlying variation.

Mark Williams: So if we were to think about the main sort of distinctions between different types of groups, what would those be?

Amy Cooter: So some of the key characteristics that really vary across these groups are their defensive versus proactively offensive stance toward the government, their investment in conspiracism writ large, some of them really care about certain conspiracy theories, others openly mock them. And also the degree to which they are let's, for lack of a better word, call it inclusive, whether they're actually welcoming towards people who aren't the stereotypical white male member.

Mark Williams: Who typically becomes a member of these types of groups? Is there a certain type of person that finds a home in such groups? And in addition to that, what do individual members actually get out of participating?

Amy Cooter: The vast majority of militia members are white men. Some units do have involvement of nonwhite members or of women, but the vast majority of people we can expect to be drawn to these groups are white men.

And a whole lot of that is because white men in particular feel aggrieved for a variety of reasons in modern society. They feel like they're losing out socioeconomically to maybe immigrants, maybe other groups who are gaining not necessarily more real power, but more visibility in society. They feel like women are taking more of the protector role, which is supposed to belong to men under a more traditional kind of framework. And in some cases these members that I've met have really personal reasons for involvement that maybe don't necessarily reflect such a bigger sense of anxiety, but more of a personal sense where they feel like they have to learn how to protect themselves against some kind of physical threat.
So for example, I met a few different members who had clear memories of being the victim of a crime growing up and they felt that they were powerless in that framework and wanted to prevent something like that from happening again.

Mark Williams: The picture Amy paints of the militia movement is so intriguing—and yet in some ways, so fraught with potential danger. How exactly does one go about studying militia movements, and do so safely? I asked Amy how she went about actually conducting her research.

Amy Cooter: So my initial approach was to effectively embed with several different militia groups in Michigan specifically. I did three years of ethnography, which means I was actually going to their trainings, their meetings, their other events both public and private. Went to some other group functions outside of Michigan, but Michigan was my primary focus.

Mark Williams: Were you out front in terms of what you were doing? Or were you a member and observing from inside?

Amy Cooter: I very clearly chose not to be a member. Each militia group has a specific set of requirements to be a member and I very carefully stayed away from fulfilling those particular checkboxes. Most of them did know that I was a student doing research on them, but I did participate in particular training exercises so that I could have a better understanding from the inside out of what that felt like, why they may be doing those things and have a clear understanding from their perspective of exactly what that kind of behavior did for them, so to speak.

Mark Williams: Were they welcoming of you as an outside observer and analyst?

Amy Cooter: Most of them were, most of them were. There were a few who, no matter what I did, were going to be skeptical, of course, but most people responded, I think, to my background coming from the rural South and wanted to tell their story. Most people like to talk about themselves, and I think that they in particular really wanted the opportunity to challenge some of the stereotypes of militias that were in popular culture at the time.

Mark Williams: Like what?

Amy Cooter: Like that they're all angry and aggressive and that everything that they do is negative or that they have this internal cult-like environment and although there very clearly are some very dangerous groups who sit around and stew in a way that fits those stereotypes. A lot of the groups I observed are almost joyful in their exercise.It's more like what they call grown up Boy Scouts. And it's about the camaraderie, it's about the opportunity for many of them to engage in exercises that were similar to what they did in the military and relive their glory days. And what's really important for me is, like I said earlier, understanding that variation, but also trying to understand how that more, for lack of a better label, positive interpretation can sometimes slip into the more radicalized, potentially dangerous version as well.

Mark Williams: Can we go back a bit to the profile of the members themselves? You say that a majority of the members were white males. Was there an age group? And what about the sort of socioeconomic status of the members?

Amy Cooter: Sure. Most militia members are in their 20s and 30s. We've seen some younger folks involved in more recent and more violent pieces of the movement. But they can range in age up till about 75. That's where some militias actually have an age cutoff for formal membership. But then other people still affiliate even after they maybe crossed that boundary for some of those groups. Socioeconomic status ranges across the board, too. The average militia member is solidly upper working class, I would say, not quite middle class, spending all of their excess money on what they see as a very serious hobby. But there are people who are very wealthy who get involved in militia movements and buy very expensive weapons and other gear, too.

Mark Williams: Is the typical white male member, is this a married individual, or are they single, or what?

Amy Cooter: Yep, a typical member is married, has kids, is someone that if you just met them out on the street, your first thought probably would not be militia member, unless they happen to be in their gear for a protest or something.

Mark Williams: Okay, some of your research focuses on the white supremacy angle and politically white supremacy obviously can be problematic in a pluralist democracy like America. It's one thing to have small pockets of white supremacists or white supremacy beliefs. It's another thing altogether when it's a much larger presence, larger groups. And I'm wondering how you would assess the scope of the white supremacy movements in the United States today.

Amy Cooter: I think that's a really important question. We certainly have groups and movements who are overtly white supremacist whose reason for being is that they hate other people who are not white. And they really want to exclude them from full civic participation and a variety of other opportunities we have. Within the militia movement specifically, what I've found is that most groups are not racist at the group level. Meaning that is not their purpose. That's not why they particularly organize.
But from a sociological perspective, something that has been really important to me is understanding how groups that may not have that as an overt framework can nonetheless contribute to white supremacy as a system, something that is a problem in society writ large for people who are militia folks, people who aren't militia folks. We know that our big picture systems in this country, so our educational system, our criminal justice system, our healthcare system, we have statistical discrimination that continues even in the absence sometimes of overt white supremacists, individual people who maybe want to discriminate. And understanding how a certain version of honoring the past or honoring firearms might actually contribute to that system has been one of my ongoing interests.

Mark Williams: There was a time when I believe a lot of people would look at the Civil War and see the resolution of that conflict as bringing a definitive end to white supremacy in the United States. The Civil War was a long time ago, and Reconstruction was a long time ago, even the Civil Rights Movement was relatively a long time ago for some people. Can you give us an idea of the dynamics of what could be perpetuating white supremacy in the context in which these groups are arising?

Amy Cooter: Sure, let me give a really specific example to try to illuminate that a little bit. As most people know, in the last few years, there's been a lot of conversation about threats to elections where some people believe the last presidential election was stolen, in part because, the conspiracy theory goes, there were just huge numbers of people voting who were ineligible to vote.
We know statistically that's not true. It's a pretty rare thing, and it did not change the outcome of the election, but it's still a pretty common belief in some corners, and I have encountered militia folks who genuinely believe that it is their duty to uphold civic society in a variety of ways. Some of them have chosen to do that by showing up armed at different protests or even at ballot drop off locations and they believe they're doing a favor to every upstanding citizen. Trying to watch, monitor, potentially record evidence that somebody's coming through and dropping off, say, hundreds of supposedly fake ballots. From their perspective, they're doing something that no one should object to.

Mark Williams: Despite the good intentions some militia groups might have for engaging in this type of public service activity, it's not hard to grasp the problems it can bring, or why Black Americans and other Americans of color wouldn't see these actions as serving the public good at all. Especially in the context of Donald Trump's Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen from him.

Amy Cooter: We know that a lot of rhetoric around these stolen elections has occurred specifically in majority Black districts. And so if we have white men showing up armed with oblivious, but positive intentions to these locations, given the history of violence and oppression in our country, and in particular, using firearms to both intimidate and actively harm Black folks, we know that that's interpreted very differently than what they may intend. That it actively can discourage people from voting, from participating in that civic duty that we have to vote. Having a different outcome that the militia members intend and one that they frankly don't understand. But what that does in practice is it is a show of racialized force, meaning that it's seen as a very white dominated action, something that has this legacy of racial violence behind it.

Mark Williams: When the intention of those who are engaged in this activity may not have that at the forefront.

Amy Cooter: May not, yes.

Mark Williams: One area of Amy's research I wanted to probe further is what triggers the radicalization of militia group members in the first place? How do people move from being a contented citizen, perhaps a bit leery of certain types of government overreach, to viewing the government as the enemy of the people, and themselves as a necessary combatant against state tyranny?

Amy Cooter: There's not just one simple answer to that, unfortunately. It can be a variety of different things. But I think that in general folks get to this point where they feel like it's their only option. Many of them are heavily influenced by social media and feeling like the proverbial temperature in society is heating up to a point that they can't escape. Some of it is also amplified by a personal crisis in some cases. Many of them listen to politicians or other leaders who are effectively in their ear saying, Yes, this is a legitimate concern; you need to be worried about this. And it all comes to a head for different reasons in particular groups.

Mark Williams: Let's shift gears and talk about accelerationism. This is a topic that I know you've researched and have a lot to say on. Could you begin by telling us what that term means?

Amy Cooter: Yeah, so accelerationism generally refers to a set of practices where people are trying to effectively push toward the end of society. They believe that our current social system, our current political system is beyond salvaging and in some cases believe it is their duty to engage in violence or other behaviors that hasten the end of society as we know it.

Mark Williams: And what is the ultimate objective of ending society?

Amy Cooter: It's hard to say because these folks don't tend to have sort of an end goal the way we would traditionally think of that kind of instrumental action. They're more interested in the actual destruction of society as opposed to having a clear vision of what they want to occur after that end point.

Mark Williams: Are they what we used to call anarchists?

Amy Cooter: That's a close approximation. It's more, though, that they don't want to just disrupt and bother the current system. So much as they really want to burn it to the ground and potentially, at least in some cases, restore whatever they think of as being a proper order, putting people back in charge who are supposed to be there. Which then lends itself to white supremacy and other kinds of oppressive structures, too.

Mark Williams: Now the title of your new book, I can't wait to read it, is Nostalgia, Nationalism, and the U. S. Militia Movement, and I'm interested in the nostalgia dimension there. Could you talk to us a little bit about what you mean by that and the role that nostalgia seems to be playing in the American militia movement?

Amy Cooter: So we have all this terminology. We talk about right wing groups. We talk about the Patriot movement. We talk about other kinds of terms that people have used to try to encapsulate similar ideology that does usually intersect on the conservative end of the spectrum, although not exclusively. And I use the term nostalgic groups because I think what they all have in common is this idea that the ideal version of society existed in the past, but it's gone. And now it's their job to either try to restore that or at least stop the further slippage away from that ideal. And what particular groups think of as that ideal, like the particular moment in history that they valorize can be different. It can happen for different reasons, but that's the fundamental thread that goes across them and allows them potential opportunities to collaborate, to see potential joint interest and then grow.

Mark Williams: I found this whole notion of nostalgia intriguing. At a very basic level, nostalgia is a longing. A sentimental longing for the past, for a time or place where happiness or happy associations were experienced. So, I put this question to Amy. What was the time or place that militia groups were nostalgic for?

Amy Cooter: So, many militia members specifically have this vision of the 1950s in their heads as some sort of halcyon period where only one person in a family had to work and support the entire household. Education was attainable. Owning a house was attainable. But in their pristine vision of this time, which I think is largely forged by Beaver Cleaver, quite frankly, that whole TV show.
They really don't recognize for the most part that was not actually such a great time period for women or for people who weren't white. And if you push them on that. It's yeah, we could say that we can, recognize that and that doesn't have to be part of my vision. They really distance themselves from the problems of that era, even as they really think about that past period as something that they've lost out on being a part of.

Mark Williams: Do they see or tend to see those two groups you mentioned, women or non-white citizens, do they see them as part of this mythical nostalgic, golden era of the country? Are they a part of it in their minds?

Amy Cooter: It varies depending on what group we're talking about. Within militias specifically, I don't think that's their immediate go-to, I think that's just not their subconscious reference point. But when you bring them to the forefront, they'll say, yeah, but today we would include them. Or today I'm obviously thinking about including them in my vision, even though that's not necessarily obvious from that reference point they choose.

Mark Williams: So how do they actually deal with the cognitive dissonance of latching on to the 1950s as a period where the vast majority of jobs are reserved for a certain select group of people. The positions of power are all reserved for a select group of people. The best paying jobs are reserved for a certain group of people. And it's a relatively thin slice of society, given that, at least in terms of gender, half the population is excluded from those privileged prosperous positions. How do they reconcile that cognitive dissonance, seeing this as a golden era? Or are they more cognizant that there is a hierarchy that's represented. It is a hierarchy that benefits perhaps them or people like them which is a good thing. And that is what one wants to reattain.

Amy Cooter: There's not just one answer across the whole militia movement specifically. And if we broaden out from the militia movement, it's even less clear than that. For example, certain neo Nazi groups say, Oh yes, that 1950s framework, it excluded women and it excluded non white folks, and that's the way it should be, and that's what we want to get back to. Within the militia movement, specifically, for the most part the men I have directly spoken with seem to say things like, Oh it's a different time now, even with their reference point remaining the same. And women can do what they want. And of course, we're more inclusive. We're doing away with the racism in my vision. Other folks aren't so clear with that. They say something that's effectively an endorsement of traditional gender roles. It's like most women that I know don't want to work anyway. And I think work really hard to maintain that as something that they can latch on to. Don't so much deal with the racism questions.

Mark Williams: One thing I learned from Amy is that when it comes to nostalgic groups as a whole, militia groups are an important sub-section because of how they prioritize the Second Amendment—the right to bear arms.

Not all nostalgic groups go out and target practice or prioritize the Second Amendment as the last line of defense that safeguards all their other rights. Not so with militia groups. In a way, Amy explained, for these groups the Second Amendment is actually the First.

Amy Cooter: They quote something that's been around the NRA for a long time and say that the Second Amendment is what allows us to have the First and every other.

Mark Williams: So do you ever talk to them about the NRA?

Amy Cooter: Interestingly enough, most of them don't like the NRA. They think it's too political. Several of them who did not have this ethnic background have become members of Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership, which they see as being much more about guns as opposed to the politics around them, which is fascinating to me.

Mark Williams: What is it about white supremacy groups and militias that you think most Americans don't understand?

Amy Cooter: I think the biggest thing is that it's not a monolith. That there are variations across all of these different groups. There are variations even within the militia movement itself. And for me, that's a really important point. Because like it or not, we live in a world of limited resources and identifying the groups that are most likely to be violent or concerning on other dimensions is helpful for our efforts to prevent violence and other harm. It's also at least theoretically helpful for helping us identify inroads to conversations that could break down some of these unjustified fears or ideas of other groups that are problematic as well.

Mark Williams: Given that white supremacist groups and domestic militias can be problematic in a pluralist democracy, are there any steps that you think Americans can take or should take to help safeguard their democracy from some of the problems these groups may pose?

Amy Cooter: The major solution that occurs to me is not an easy thing politically. It is not an easy thing in terms of the timeline, but I genuinely believe that as a society we need to do a much better job educating folks accurately about our national history and particularly our history as relates to things like Native American genocide, slavery, and ongoing racism.
I think that a lot of school kids come through the public education system with very partial understandings of those events and why they actually still matter today. In terms of both the outcomes for folks who aren't white and also for how we as a country aren't quite pristine, let's say, as we're often led to believe. That we really have a history that we could learn from in a much more robust way.

Mark Williams: If there's no quick solution to protect democracy from the dangers white supremacist and militia groups might pose, I wondered about Amy's concerns regarding the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

Amy Cooter: Right now, we see these groups as a whole as being relatively quiet, but the problem is they're paying very close attention to what is happening with Trump. It would take really minimal effort to stir them back up again and so I personally am quite worried as we head into the next presidential election cycle. I'm afraid we're going to have potential violence at polling locations, maybe continuing issues at school board meetings, and more local issues that these groups have really zoomed in on in the last couple of years.

Mark Williams: Okay. Amy Cooter, it has been a delight to talk to you about what is a really important topic and I'm really glad that you made the time to stop by and talk with us today on “New Frontiers.” Thank you.

Amy Cooter: Thank you.