This article examines the role of violent, revolutionary-style rhetoric within the ideology of the American militia movement. It argues that the willingness of militia members to embrace a language of violence is based, in part, on their understanding of mainstream American patriotism, and that it is therefore problematic to simply dismiss it as the work of “typical extremists.” The article also compares the militias’ use of violent rhetoric to that employed by black radicals such as Malcolm X and the Black Panthers during the 1960s, and places both within the context of recurrent debates about the limits of free speech within American society. It argues that the use of violent language should not always be read literally—as a direct incitement to commit violent acts—but that in some circumstances it might be better understood as one of the few strategies available to those who regard themselves as politically powerless to capture public attention, dramatize an issue, and build a new political movement.

Before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, the threat of major political violence taking place within the United States seemed most likely to come from America’s own homegrown extremists. The final decade of the twentieth century had seen not only the rise of a significant new social movement—armed citizens’ militias—but also, and not un-coincidently in many observers’ eyes, the worst act of domestic terrorism in American history: the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on 19 April 1995, in which 168 people lost their lives. In the broadest terms, the emergence of the militia movement in the 1990s was a product of a widespread sense that the United States was a nation in decline: politically, economically, morally, and spiritually. Concerns over abortion rights, gay rights, gun control, affirmative action policies, educational standards, immigration policy, environmental issues, the effect of international trade agreements like GATT and NAFTA on the American economy, and the apparent “militarization” of American law enforcement all seemed to be motivating militia members. Yet, it is also the case that the movement wouldn’t have emerged when it did without the impact of three very specific events—the siege of Randy Weaver and his family at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in August 1992; the disastrous assault on David Koresh’s Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, in 1993; and the successful passage, in the same year, of what is popularly known as the Brady Bill, the most significant piece of federal gun control legislation since the Gun Control Act of 1968.1

Responding to these events, militia members saw themselves as the vanguard of a revolutionary movement, one that would wake the American people up to what was going on around them and help the United States to once again become the kind of nation it was [End Page 120] originally intended to have been: a limited republic in which the states predominated, the federal government’s powers were radically circumscribed, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms received its due recognition as the very cornerstone of the constitutional system. A crucial part of the militias’ endeavour to restore this “lost republic” involved their use of American history, especially the history of the American Revolution, as a means of analyzing and critiquing contemporary U.S. politics and society.2 Violent, revolutionary-style rhetoric was enthusiastically embraced as part of this process. By employing this tactic, militia members were not just marking themselves out as “typical extremists.” They were also highlighting the central role played by violence in more mainstream constructions of American patriotic identity, and making claims—justified or not—upon these constructions.

Lines in the Sand As militia members saw it, they were the “George Washingtons of today.” Americans, they argued, had to “throw off the tyrants” again, just as they had in 1776 (Thompson). This was feasible, it was thought, because their forefathers had defeated Great Britain, one of the most powerful nations of the eighteenth century, with the support of “only about 4% of the people in the colonies” (McKinzey 2). Accordingly, they felt that Americans should embrace the example set by the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord and take up arms in order to combat the “bullying-bureaucrats and two-bit tyrants” who were intent on stealing their freedom. Indeed, “the primary trigger” for the American Revolution was the same then as it was now, which is to say, “you don’t mess with a free man’s right to keep and bear arms” (Kentucky Riflemen 4). Militia members believed it was important, in this respect, to follow the advice of Samuel Adams and act to resist a government “both tyrannical and lawless,” rather than meekly crouching down to “lick the hand” that fed you—such resistance, it was reasoned, was simply being loyal to the spirit of the founding fathers and to the Declaration of Independence (Common Sense 1). Appearing before Congress in 1995, one militia leader, J.J. Johnson, described the movement as composed of people who had “‘Don’t Tread on Me’ stamped across their foreheads” (103). They were people, he said, who were “drawing a line in the sand,” and he warned that at the time of the first Revolution the “British didn’t get the hint” [End Page 121] about what was really going on “until they saw dead redcoats” lying all about them. The “only thing standing between some of the current legislation being contemplated [in Congress] and armed conflict is time,” Johnson said (92–3). It was a common assertion. In the view of Norman Olson, another prominent militia leader, armed conflict was all but inevitable “if the country doesn’t turn around” (Anti-Defamation League, Armed & Dangerous 2). For “Joan,” a spokesperson for the North Carolina Militia, because the “blood of our ancestors is flowing in our veins,” neither the North Carolina Militia nor the militia movement as a whole would be willing to “submit to lives of slavery.” On the contrary, she said, “we are willing to die for our beliefs.We will fight to the last man or [woman] because we would rather die than live a life where there is no justice or freedom” (“Joan”). In the oft-repeated words of Patrick Henry, it seemed that for many militia members, in the end, it was all a question of “Liberty or Death” (Gonzales 5; Wake-Up Call America 7; Field Manual). Unsurprisingly, law enforcement officials, civil rights groups, and local, state, and national politicians expressed considerable concern about the militia movement’s use of this kind of rhetoric—what the Anti-Defamation League called its “revolutionary posturing” (Anti-Defamation League, Armed & Dangerous 26). It was taken to provide clear and incontrovertible evidence of the danger the militias posed: of their confrontational and trigger-happy intent; of their unreasonable—and irrational—expectations; and of their frenzied readiness to commit acts of violence, whether in response to specific legislative enactments of which they disapproved (most obviously gun control laws) or in some more generalized future conflict with the federal government. Concern was also expressed about the effect such language could have on the “marketplace of ideas,” especially when it was taken in conjunction with the militias’ penchant for camouflage fatigues and paramilitary-style training (American Jewish Committee 26).3 Even in the absence of actual violent activity, the militias’ rhetoric was seen as intimidating, both to private citizens and to public officials. This was particularly so at the grassroots level, where local authorities often lacked the manpower and resources to combat the potential threat posed by the militias.4 Concerns about the effects of the militias’ propaganda understandably took on a new sense of urgency following the Oklahoma City bombing. As Michigan Senator Carl Levin saw it, for example, [End Page 122] “extreme hate rhetoric contributes to an incendiary atmosphere in which an unstable individual will take the rhetoric seriously and light a match or a fuse” (44). President Clinton addressed the same issue during a speech at Iowa State University six days after the bombing. “Words have consequences,” he said, “and to pretend otherwise was idle.” After all, Patrick Henry hadn’t stood up and said “‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ expecting it to fall on deaf ears,” nor had Thomas Jefferson written the Declaration of Independence expecting his words to simply “vanish [into] thin air.” Of course words had consequences, and it was incumbent on all Americans to speak out against the kind of violent speech emanating from militia members, speech that might “push fragile people over the edge”; speech which had the potential, the president said, to take the United States “into a dark place” (“Iowa” 711). Ten days later, in a speech at Michigan State University, Clinton challenged the militias’ broader claims on American history. Expressing his outrage that militia members were trying to “appropriate our sacred symbols for paranoid purposes” in comparing themselves to the “colonial militias who fought for the democracy you now rail against,” the president declared: “How dare you suggest that we in the freest nation on earth live in tyranny! How dare you call yourselves patriots and heroes!” (“Michigan” 773). Such concerns are absolutely legitimate, of course. The dangers posed by armed groups spouting violent rhetoric should not be minimized. Acknowledging these facts, however, shouldn’t prevent us from digging a little deeper into what is transpiring when militia members embrace a language of violence, or lead us to ignore the fact that militia members are far from alone in applying the language of America’s Revolutionary past in the way they do. After all, the unexplored implication of Senator Levin’s remark—that the real danger lies in unstable individuals taking the militias’ rhetoric “seriously” and going out and setting off bombs—is that “normal,” “stable” people understand that such talk isn’t intended to be taken “seriously”–in the sense of its being a direct incitement to violence– and that such rhetoric fulfils other functions within the militias’ ideological system. It is worth exploring what these other functions might be.

Alternative Readings Most obviously, militia members want to establish a connection with those they see as their revolutionary predecessors. [End Page 123] Establishing such a connection is a means of bolstering both their individual and their collective sense of identity. (And, militia members might say, if America’s founding fathers spoke in violent terms and undertook violent actions, why shouldn’t they?) But, by emulating the example of America’s founding fathers in this way, militia members are also hoping to call attention to themselves. Ray Southwell of the Michigan Militia made exactly this point during an interview with the Detroit Metro Times: “People say, ‘Why the camouflage and guns?’ And I say, ‘Without the camouflage and guns, no one would pay any attention’” (Hawkins 7). A similar self-consciousness is at play in the militias’ revolutionary rhetoric. Militia members are well aware that its use will get them noticed, and employ it precisely for this reason. The threats of violent confrontation explicitly and implicitly contained in the militia movement’s literature and public pronouncements have the same function as their uniforms, guns, and marches—to a considerable extent, they operate as a demand for attention and a call for recognition. Violence, after all, has tended to play very well in American society and culture. Throughout the history of the United States, numerous groups, from the far left and the far right, have deployed violence and the threat of violence in order to advance their political claims: Sons of Liberty, Know Nothings, radical abolitionists, antiabolitionists, Klansmen, anarchists, socialists, Wobblies, Panthers, Weathermen, Christian Identity adherents, and anti-abortion activists among them.5 In the case of the militias, there are two different audiences for this rhetoric: potential future militia members, and those in positions of power in the political mainstream. With regard to the latter, we can see the militias’ revolutionary language as an attempt to convince local, state, and federal politicians, government officials, and law enforcement personnel that they should take militia members and their concerns seriously. Indeed, it is perhaps an indication of the lack of influence which militia members feel they have through the conventional channels of political activity—their essential powerlessness— that they attempt to “shortcut” them in this way.6 It could also be argued that such a strategy is based on a realistic assessment of the movement’s numerical weakness.7 As far as potential future militia members are concerned—those in the wider Patriot movement, in the gun culture, constitutionalists, libertarians, and so on, who might be sympathetic to the militias’ concerns—the rhetoric of revolutionary action also functions as a call for recruitment to the movement, rather than necessarily being a call to immediate [End Page 124] violent action. In most of the examples noted in the previous section, the violent talk was followed by an emphasis on the importance of finding “like-minded people” and of “getting organized,” with plentiful exhortations for gun owners and others to “stand-up together” and “make a difference.” Getting other people involved means making the issues at stake seem worth standing up for. This is part of the discursive work required when trying to build a political movement, and invocations of violence are a swift and effective way of raising those stakes. The militias’ talk of drawing “lines in the sand” provides a richly symbolic illustration of the lengths to which they are prepared to go to in order to achieve their aims. It is a strategy with positive psychological benefits, reinforcing militia members’ own sense of worthiness and heroism. What could be more formidable than expressing a willingness to take on the agencies of the state? And to die in the process? What greater indication of seriousness and importance could there be? Unpleasant and uncomfortable as it is, it would be a mistake in this regard to ignore what David Apter calls “the heroic side of political violence” (3) or to downplay the significance of Frantz Fanon’s insights on the “positive and creative qualities” of violence: its transformative, cleansing, and restorative functions (73–4).8 Whatever else it does—or is intended to do—the militias’ confrontational rhetoric serves to dramatize the heroic activities that militia members see themselves involved in, and this dramatization is a key aspect of its use.

Reconstructing Patriotism Central to the militias’ heroic posturing is the notion of patriotism. In The Roots of American Loyalty, Merle Curti wrote that although patriotism has meant many things and has been put to many varied uses, it “may nevertheless be defined as love of country, pride in it, and readiness to make sacrifices for what is considered its best interest” (viii). The ultimate sacrifice, of course—the ultimate declaration of one’s love for one’s country—is being prepared to give one’s life for it. The militias’ revolutionary rhetoric is intended to be a mark of their patriotism. We need to understand militia members’ expressions of their “willingness to die” within these terms. Declarations of this kind are part of the lingua franca of American patriotism (as they are of patriotism worldwide). Patrick Henry’s [End Page 125] “Liberty or Death” speech is a prime example. Declaimed, anthologized, reproduced, remembered, and revered ever since William Wirt’s 1815 biography of Henry detached it from the oral tradition which had sustained it for the previous forty years, Henry’s speech is widely regarded as one of the quintessential texts of American patriotic identity: a hymn to liberty and democracy (McCants 58); “the oratorical essence of the American Revolution,” which was chosen to symbolize the nation’s “spirit” during its Bicentennial celebrations (Olsen 19).9 The very centrality of Henry’s speech to the American political canon was presumably one of the reasons why Clinton chose to invoke it, together with the Declaration of Independence, during his “Words have consequences” speech at Iowa State University. There is no little tension, though, between Clinton’s invocation of Henry as a member of the patriotic pantheon and the actual content of Henry’s speech, which was, after all, a call to arms, a discourse on the necessity of political violence, and a rousing appeal for others to follow Henry’s example in forcefully engaging the enemy.10 It is a tension Malcolm X tried to exploit more than once during the 1960s, when defending himself from charges that he was a political extremist. Speaking at the University of Ghana in 1964, for example, he made the case that Americans in 1776 hadn’t turned “the other cheek to the British. No, they had an old man named Patrick Henry, who said, ‘Liberty or death!’” Malcolm complained that he had never heard his critics refer to Henry “as an advocate of violence.” On the contrary, “they say he’s one of the Founding Fathers, because he had sense to say, ‘Liberty or death!’” Black Americans of the time, Malcolm argued, were reaching the point “where they are ready to tell the Man no matter what the odds are against them, no matter what the cost is, it’s liberty or death” (18). A similar tension is evident in Clinton’s use of the Declaration of Independence, a document that underpins much of the militia movement’s revolutionary analysis and arguments. When Clinton invoked the Declaration during his speech at Iowa State, he was calling upon the document as it is generally recalled and understood within American society—a “sacred text” that offers a “moral standard by which the day-to-day policies and practices of the nation [can] be judged” (Maier 154). He was reaching back through time, to Martin Luther King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, calling on America to honour the Declaration’s promise to the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; to Abraham [End Page 126] Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863 declaring that the nation born in 1776 was one “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”; and, ultimately of course, to Thomas Jefferson himself. It is an understanding of the Declaration that forms the basis of a particular strand of American patriotism, one John Schaar has termed “covenanted patriotism.” This form of patriotism is “unique to America,” Schaar believes, because it is based not on blood, race, religion, or territory, but on political ideas. “Those principles and commitments [of the Declaration of Independence] are the core of American identity, the soul of the body politic,” Schaar argues (291). There is, however, another, more martial meaning attached to the Declaration of Independence, and it is this meaning that the militia movement relies upon. Militia members have, in the main, sought to return the Declaration to its “original” revolutionary purpose, emphasizing not the right of the people to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—the part of the preamble that Clinton was invoking; the part most people remember—but rather their right to “alter or abolish” governments that have become destructive of their liberties, which was, of course, the key to the document’s significance in the eighteenth century (Becker 8; Lucas 68; Howell 232–3; Maier 209–14). This is not to say that militia members are unaware of the basis on which the modern reputation of the Declaration rests, and the document is certainly revered as both “sacred” and central to American identity. But it is this other aspect of the Declaration—its role as a revolutionary manifesto— that militia members attach most significance to, and draw most sustenance from. That Clinton and others in the mainstream should downplay the revolutionary significance of the Declaration is hardly surprising. As Pauline Maier has noted, revolutionary documents are always uncomfortable for established governments to have to deal with (211). This was especially evident in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, during the campaign for “100% Americanism,” when, as Merle Curti points out, legislature after legislature rushed to condemn as “treasonable any expression of belief in the right of revolution” from radicals and socialists. “The fact that the country had originated in revolution and that almost all the notable figures of the nineteenth century had openly expressed their belief in the right of revolution was conveniently overlooked” (235). [End Page 127] Clinton’s speech illustrates some of the problems involved in using the past as a political tool in the present. If the president was really intent on encouraging more civility in public discourse, then his two examples could certainly have been better chosen. More fundamentally, though, Clinton and the militias’ differing uses of Patrick Henry and the Declaration of Independence also helps to illuminate some of the tensions that exist between the two dominant strands or traditions of American patriotism, as well as demonstrating how closely intertwined they are. The first strand—covenanted patriotism, to use Schaar’s term—has already been identified. This strand is generally seen as progressive and emancipatory, a force for good in the world, based as it is on the expansion of equality, liberty, justice, and freedom for all.11 The values associated with the second strand of American patriotism are not so unambiguously positive. This is the militaristic strand, and it is built around more troublesome notions of blood, violence, bodily sacrifice, and martial fervor. Of course the strengths of the latter may be necessary to realize the goals of the former, and few have gone as far as to argue that the militaristic strand of patriotism is completely dispensable.12 Indeed, its assets may well be essential when it comes to protecting the homeland from external threats. Nonetheless, it is easy to see how the values associated with the militaristic strand of American patriotism can be problematic. Troublesome or problematic as it may be, however, the values associated with militaristic patriotism are also highly prized and deeply embedded within American culture. Indeed, according to Edward Linenthal, they represent the “primal themes of patriotic orthodoxy: war as holy crusade, bringing new life to the nation and the warrior as a culture hero and savior” (4). The militias’ use of both Patrick Henry’s speech and the Declaration of Independence as revolutionary manifesto falls within this category. The same is true of a third important component of the militias’ revolutionary reconstructions, their invocations of the example set by the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord. From casual allusion to detailed retellings, members of the militia movement have made extensive use of the Minutemen as providing a “heroic model for today[’s] citizen soldiers” (“Book Review”).13 Again, this shouldn’t really come as a surprise. As Linenthal has pointed out, the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775 stand as one of the most important physical and imaginative sites in the American “patriotic orthodoxy,” “sacred ground” where [End Page 128] “memories of the transformative power of war and the sacrificial heroism of the warrior are preserved” (3). Lexington and Concord, he says, are “prime martial centers” in American culture, and the Minutemen are the “primal patriots” (22): holy warriors “who killed not out of hate but out of the forceful inspiration of the love of liberty” (17); sacrificial figures who brought the new republic into being “through the agency of holy war” (11). What’s more, the militias’ use of these figures—and the values and ideals they represent—are barely distinguishable from how a wide range of others have used them: from actual participants in the battles to presidents, would-be presidents, military officers, poets, sculptors, painters, advertisers, and political activists; from the Reverend Jonas Clark through Ralph Waldo Emerson and Daniel Chester French to John F. Kennedy, Robert DePugh, John Kerry, and Noam Chomsky (Linenthal 40–3). Critics of the militias in organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center would bridle at any discussion of the militias within the terms of American patriotism. They do not see the militias’ expressions of patriotic identification as genuine; to them, the militias are “false patriots,” their patriotic words and gestures cynical window dressing intended to disguise a deeper racism and religious bigotry (Southern Law Poverty Center, False Patriots 4–5).14 The radical right, it seems, has always known that American patriotism is an effective language to lay claim to within the United States, even if the radical left, mostly as a consequence of the Vietnam War, has largely abandoned it (Gitlin 134; Schaar 41). However, distinguishing “genuine” from “false” patriotism is not necessarily a straightforward undertaking. Which version of American patriotism is the most important to adhere to? Can one be a sincere and “genuine” patriot and have dangerous, stupid, or bad ideas? Can one be a “false” patriot yet still express some of the basic tenets of American patriotic identity? Patriotism, after all, is not some neutral, timeless or natural concept. It is a construction: a political weapon to be unleashed against one’s opponents or a soothing salve to comfort one’s allies. The “drive to build the nation reveals paradoxical processes of unifying and dividing, consolidating and fracturing, remembrance and amnesia,” writes Cecelia O’Leary in her history of American patriotism, To Die For (4).15 A crucial part of the amnesia accompanying the construction of the American nation centres on the role played by violence—real and imagined; justified and illegitimate; [End Page 129] casual and philosophical—in the founding and subsequent development of the United States. Indeed, according to Barbara Ehrenreich, Americans have long tried to maintain an artificial distinction between nationalism—which is seen as essentially “foreign” and prone to “irrational and bloody excess”—and patriotism, which is seen as “quintessentially American,” “clearheaded and virtuous.” This is a useful cultural fiction to maintain, she says, because “by convincing ourselves that our nationalism is unique among nationalisms, we do not have to acknowledge its primitive and bloody side” (216–7). One of the reasons why so many in mainstream America object so strongly to the militias’ use of America’s Revolutionary past is that the militias do articulate the nation’s “primitive and bloody side,” and in so doing they provide an uncomfortable reminder of this aspect of America’s nationalistic or patriotic constructions—the other dark places of American society.16 All of which is to say that words also “have consequences” because the patriotic orthodoxy (the one Clinton was seeking to defend in his speeches in Iowa and Michigan) is vulnerable to challenge and continually needs to be reinforced and protected: How dare you! These symbols do not belong to you! Who do you think you are? It is also because, as Ernest Gellner puts it, the “cultural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary inventions” (56). The militia movement (although not, it must be said, in any systematic or even necessarily fully conscious way) is working at—and in—the fissures and cracks of American patriotic identity, threatening to undermine its arbitrary and tension-ridden constructions.17

Free Speech and Needle Factories When President Clinton attacked the militias during his speeches at Michigan State and Iowa State universities, he was well aware that freedom of speech issues were being raised, and he was equally clear that he had no intention of infringing upon the First Amendment rights of militia members. Although he was certain that the militias were “encouraging conduct” that would “undermine the fabric of the country,” his answer, as noted earlier, was a classically libertarian one: more speech (“Iowa” 711). Of course, freedom of speech is one of the centerpieces of democratic society, crucial to the effective functioning of the marketplace of ideas, and some of the significant stakes involved in the [End Page 130] discursive battle that took place between the president and the militias have already been discussed. But should the freedom of speech of those who would attack democracy really be protected? Of those who are a threat to the free speech of others? Who intimidate public officials? And who themselves seem intent on closing down the marketplace of ideas? Is the Bill of Rights really expected to be, as Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson once put it, “a suicide pact?” (Walker 47) The answer, at least from the perspective of the Supreme Court is, to a certain extent, yes. As the constitutional scholar Lee Bollinger has written, the United States has “devised a remarkable legal principle under which highly subversive and socially harmful speech is protected against governmental regulation.” In sharp contrast to the position taken by other democracies— Canada and the United Kingdom, for example—Americans “are at liberty to advocate the violent overthrow of the government, to urge the violation of legitimate and valid law, to speak obscenities in public places, and to argue for discrimination against racial and religious groups” (3). Popular wisdom to the contrary notwithstanding, this situation is not an especially longstanding or hallowed one. In fact, the Supreme Court only began to interpret the First Amendment in 1919, in a series of cases that dealt with the rights of radical, socialist, and anarchist dissenters during World War I. Prior to that time, the usual situation was one where unpopular minority views were suppressed by those in the majority.18 The most important of these early cases was Schenck v. United States,19 which established an initial test of “clear and present danger.” Following Schenck, albeit with the notable exception of the conviction of twelve leaders of the American Communist Party in the Dennis case of 1951, the Supreme Court has continued to expand the First Amendment rights of political dissidents. These political speech cases reached a climax in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, when the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Charles Brandenburg, an Ohio leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Brandenburg had been imprisoned under a 1919 criminal syndicalism law, which made it illegal to advocate violence as means of accomplishing political change, after he had publicly declared, “We are not a revengent [sic] organization, but if our President, our Congress, our Supreme Court, continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race, it’s possible that there might have to be some revengence [sic] taken” (Walker 114). As a result of the case, the most extreme political speech, up to and including the advocacy [End Page 131] of violent revolution, was deemed protected under the First Amendment, although the Court was also clear that any direct incitement to an immediate criminal act, such as assassination or bombing, was not protected.20 The advantages of this approach are clear enough. It is, after all, a rational desire, as Justice Holmes once noted, to want to silence the views of those we find offensive (Bollinger and Stone 8), and we should be careful to avoid simply protecting the rights of those whose views we approve of. The results of this approach has certainly been to aid the development of political movements as diverse as the civil rights movement, the black power movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the anti-abortion movement, and, of course, the militia movement in recent times. But, it is also easy to see why the Court’s approach is problematic. As Bollinger points out, The trouble with speech behavior . . . is that it very often demands a response from those who know of it. It compels us to act in response, and in that sense it exerts a controlling power over other people’s behavior. It is agenda-setting, for without any response, messages different from those we want to be communicated are communicated. (64) What Bollinger is getting at, and here he is impinging upon a much wider debate about the status of “hate speech” in the US, is that communities are defined as much by what they don’t do as by what they do.21 In other words, by not acting to limit the kind of violent speech emanating from the likes of the militia movement, the Court, and by extension the democracy it represents, appears to be granting, if not quite approval, then at least a measure of legitimacy to such radical groups, a legitimacy that others in that democracy may find not just distasteful but positively harmful. It can also be argued that extremist leaders shouldn’t be allowed to hide behind the protections offered by the First Amendment, thereby insulating themselves from the violent actions carried out by their followers on the basis that when they spoke about, say, the imminent necessity of “armed conflict,” they were simply engaging in some broad discussion of political doctrine rather than urging any immediate violation of the law. Mike German, a former FBI agent and counterterrorism instructor whose successful infiltration of the Washington State Militia led to the conviction of four of its [End Page 132] members on various weapons and bomb charges, is a forceful advocate of this view. He argues that what the leaders of groups like the militias do is “create a justification for action and urgency,” and, as far as German is concerned, the legal system needs to have a much greater appreciation of the wider network that inspires violence. As he puts it, “we need to quit searching the haystack and start going after the needle factories” (B1).22 Such concerns are not new, of course. Many of the questions raised by the rise of the militias are the same ones that were raised by the appearance of the Black Panthers and the Minutemen in the 1960s, and the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, the Silver Shirts, and the German-American Bund in the 1920s and 1930s. A brief comparison between the violent rhetoric of the militias and that of the Black Panther Party is, perhaps, especially instructive in this regard. Consider, for example, the speech made by David Hilliard at the San Francisco Moratorium Demonstration on 15 November 1969. Denouncing the United States as a country with a “blood stained history,” Hilliard raged against the Vietnam War, the imprisonment of fellow Panthers Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, and the “war of genocide being waged against Black people right here in America” (129), before the speech climaxed with an apparent call for the assassination of the President, Richard Nixon: Richard Nixon is an evil man. This is the motherfucker that unleashed the counter-insurgent teams upon the BPP. This is the man that’s responsible for all the attacks on the Black Panther Party nationally. This is the man that sends his vicious murderous dogs out into the Black community and invade upon [sic] our Black Panther Party Breakfast Programs. . . . Fuck that motherfucking man.We will kill Richard Nixon.We will kill any motherfucker that stands in the way of our freedom. We ain’t here for no goddammed peace, because we know that we can’t have peace because this country was built on war. And if you want peace you got to fight for it. (130) Hilliard’s comments attracted considerable attention, and during an interview for CBS News a month later, he sought to defend himself. He was simply exercising his constitutional right to free speech, he said. His words were intentionally being taken out of context by the government and its “ideological lackeys” in the media. He wasn’t calling for the assassination of Nixon (“We are not that stupid”). [End Page 133] What he had said was just “political rhetoric. We can call it a metaphor. It is the language of the ghetto” (132–3).23 Hilliard’s defence returns us to a point made earlier about the idea of a sense of “powerlessness” that might help explain why people like those in the militias or the Panthers are inclined to embrace a language of violence. To quote DavidWalker, “in the absence of real political power, words—extreme, emotionally loaded words—are one of the few devices available to the powerless for capturing attention, dramatizing an issue, and mobilizing people for change” (112). As the First Amendment scholar Kent Greenawalt says, “it is not a coincidence that those less privileged culturally or more radical politically are likely to use words and phrases that might be judged to impair civil discourse” (298).24 How one responds to such emotionally charged rhetoric will likely have more to do with how one feels about the political platform being advanced than it will about the “offensiveness” of the words being used to do so. To take just one example, in the foreword to the collection of documents from which Hilliard’s speech is taken, Stanford University history professor Clayborne Carson provides an enthusiastic endorsement of the Panthers’ “willingness to die” for their particular cause. As Carson sees it, “the Black Panther Party at its best offers a historical example of brave activists willing to ‘die for the people’ and thus continues to provide discontented African-American youth an alternative to self-destructive despair” (xviii). Carson’s words clearly demonstrate that even the well-educated in respectable positions are not immune to the romantic appeal of “heroic” posturing and the rhetoric of violence.25