Free Republic

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — They railed against politicians, conducted military-style exercises and spoke darkly of confronting tyrants scheming to seize their guns and enslave them. Yet historian JoEllen Vinyard says the “citizen militia” activists she got to know in the 1990s didn’t seem like the types who would abduct a governor or stage a coup. “I don’t think they were dangerous,” said Vinyard, an Eastern Michigan University professor emeritus and author of a book about far-right movements in the state. “They reminded me of the good old boys I knew growing up in Nebraska.” But as four men charged...

A special report on militia groups and gun owners who support Second Amendment rights and the Constitutional concept of citizen militias is scheduled to be aired on a major news outlet this Thursday evening. The report has all the markings of a smear job due to the fact that its main source of information is the leftwing front group, the Southern Poverty Law Center. In a series of ads announcing the upcoming report, News Channel 7, WSPA-TV, which serves one of the top 30 television markets in America, states that 'militia groups are growing and they are even right here...

FELLOW FREEPERS, PLEASE FIRST READ MY COMMENTS BELOW AS A PREFACE Rarely does scholarship anticipate the most dramatic events of the moment. In this timely work Gary Hart does just that, arguing for the restoration of republican virtues and for homeland security as an important first step. The American democratic republic has from its founding been a paradoxical success. Simultaneously attached to state and national power, citizens' rights and citizens' duties, American democracy has uniquely turned its reliance on consent from the governed into a powerful governing of the consenting. In a remarkable political feat, America's founders combined mixed government,...

Bisbee, Arizona Militia leader Chris Simcox says he is set today to lauch the first patrols along the border with members of his Civil Homeland Defense groupSimcox says he plans to have groups of armed citizens patrolling three areas of the Arizona-Mexico line, though he wouldn't specify the sites.A second patrol, to be put on for the news media is scheduled for Sunday.