[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]
The details about Schaeffer Cox,
the Alaska militiaman arrested in a plot to kill and kidnap state troopers and local judges, are starting to emerge -- and they have a distinctly familiar ring to them. From the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner:
Details emerge in alleged plot to kill Alaska State Troopers judge
State court documents made available Friday detail the murders and
kidnappings allegedly planned by Schaeffer Cox and militia followers as
well as the secret FBI recordings that helped expose the plan.
The plan, which members of Cox’s Peacemakers Militia reportedly
code-named “241” (two for one), was created as a potential retaliatory
response to any attempt by law enforcement to arrest Cox, who had an
outstanding bench warrant for not attending a trial over a misdemeanor
weapons charge.
Under the plan, Cox and other militia members would kidnap two law
enforcement officers or court officials for every militia member
arrested. They would kill two officials in retaliation for every militia
member killed in any conflict with authorities.
The document accuses the group of assembling an arsenal that included
pineapple grenades allegedly stolen from Fort Wainwright, multiple
tripod-mounted machine guns and “dozens of other high-powered assault
rifles and pistols.” The court documents don’t say whether search
warrants for the weapons were obtained, or if the weapons have been
seized.
Most of the information in the charging documents come from private
militia “command staff” meetings “lawfully recorded by the FBI through
technological means available to them.”
Four of the five defendants accused of conspiring to murder and
kidnap are described discussing the plan in a 17-page criminal
complaint. Besides Cox, the co-defendants are Coleman Barney, 36, of the
North Pole area and Salcha residents Lonnie Vernon, 55 his wife and
Karen Vernon, 66.
It's abundantly clear that Cox is following the career of so many
"sovereign citizens" before him -- from
Gordon Kahl to
Randy and Vicki Weaver to
Jerry and Joe Kane:
You start out as a laughable loony nutcase who believes in an
alternative universe constructed of provably untrue conspiracy theories,
and you end up a violent, extremist nutcase willing to gun down federal
officers.
You can observe this gradual but inexorable career arc just in the
videos Cox made before his arrest, including the above interview with a
fundamentalist pastor made in January. In it, you can hear Cox's violent
fantasies starting to bubble up, even as he claims to have 3,500
members in his Alaska militia organization:
COX: If there came a time where they were endangering my family, you bet
I would kill those federal agents. And what kind of a father and
husband would I be if I wouldn't? Would I sacrifice my family on the
altar of submission to the wicked state? No, that would be despicable,
we would highly criticize anybody who did that, stood by and watched in
history. And we've got to reckon with the fact that that's our time
right now.
Now, we have those agents -- with 3500 guys we have tremendous
resources at our disposal. And we had those guys under 24-hour
surveillance -- the six trouble-causers that came up from the federal
government. And we could have had them killed within 20 minutes of
giving the order. But we didn't because they had not yet done it.
Of course, you will notice that since Cox's arrest, those supposed
3500 militiamen have been pretty nonexistent on the scene, and none of
the law-enforcement officers involved in his arrest have been subject to
any kind of retaliation at all.
You can also hearing him make the usual disclaimers that they kick
out any "violent" types from militias -- which, as always, are about as
reliable as the Minutemen's similar disclaimers.
Dermot Cole at the News-Miner has more details on Cox's background:
Schaeffer Cox told a “National Collective Consciousness
Call” in January that law enforcement officers and the court system in
Fairbanks always treated him with “total respect” because they feared
the firepower of his militia.
There is no independent verification of how big or small his group
is, but he has repeatedly claimed he had 3,500 members under his
command.
The 26-year-old Cox said he was treated like a foreign diplomat by
the Alaska courts and didn’t have to follow the rules “because I am not
of them.”
“They never make me take my hat off or say ‘your honor’ or stand up
like that. I refer to them as the ‘alleged judge’ or ‘your
administrativeness.’ And I don’t do anything. The police are always ‘oh
yes sir, yes sir,’ very nice there.
“And they’re doing that because they know we’ve got ‘em outmanned and
outgunned,” he said on the Jan. 6 conference call, a recording of which
is posted on the American Underground Network website
http://aunetwork.tv/.
He said he told an “alleged judge” last year he could give an order
for his militia members to “stand down,” but he couldn’t guarantee they
would listen if they thought the case against Cox was politically
motivated.
“From one father to another father, I don’t want to put my influence
to the test while the lives of you and your children are on the line,”
he said he told the judge.
“I said if you want a bloody fight, if you want a war, then we’ve got
one hell of a war with your name on it. But if you want peace, well
then that’s what we want too,” Cox said.
Likewise,
David Holthouse has the full rundown on Alaska's increasingly unhinged and violent "Patriot" movement scene:
As it stands, other Alaska militia leaders are rallying to Cox’s
defense in regards to the firearms case, while making no mention of his
other legal troubles. “Allow me to state that I am behind Schaeffer Cox
100 percent,” says Norm Olson, leader of the Kenai Peninsula-based
Alaska Citizens Militia. “His [sovereign citizen] argument is valid. The
court that is claiming jurisdiction is an ‘Admiralty Court’ constructed
under statute laws of the corporation known as The State of Alaska.
Schaeffer wants to be tried in a court of common law where he can face
his accuser directly and try the law as well as the evidence before him.
Mr. Cox is fully aware that a jury that is called to listen to the
charges has the right and duty to try not only the evidence, but to
judge the correctness of the law itself. Schaeffer is not unwilling to
be tried, but he wants to plead his case before a common law court with a
jury of his peers. Can he expect that in Alaska? Only time will tell.”
Before we get into Olson’s reference to Admiralty Courts and Common
Law and other Sovereign Citizen gobbledygook, it’s worth airing his take
on the militia movement in Alaska. After all, Olson’s a militia O.G.
Olson started the Michigan Militia in 1994 and helped turn that state
into a hotbed of right-wing extremist activity in the mid-to-late
1990s. Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols attended a
Michigan Militia meeting not long before the terrorist attack he carried
out with Timothy McVeigh.
Asked to assess the current strength of the militia movement in
Alaska, Olson offered this response: “Of course I cannot answer that
question. To do so would risk compromising our operational objectives
and resources. Suffice it to say that we are ‘nowhere and everywhere.’ I
will say that any move against one of our units or members is actually a
way of bringing central government abuses into the forefront of the
community’s awareness. The ongoing persecution of Schaeffer Cox is a
boon to our enlistment efforts.”
Here are some earlier clips of Cox in action. In these, you
can see Cox cocoon himself in the sovereign-citizen alternative
universe, and his rhetoric becomes increasingly violent and paranoid:
This is a story that has played itself out a number of times over the
past twenty years -- I've witnessed a number of court hearings
involving "sovereign citizens" trying to impose their fabricated "legal"
system on the real world -- and it never has a happy outcome.
Inevitably, as they become hardened in their belief that their legal
fantasy is reality, there comes a confrontation with law enforcement.
Often, both sides suffer harm -- but only one side loses.
In my first book,
In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest, I devoted most of the second chapter to describing the dynamics of this alternative universe:
The Patriot movement appears to operate in the mainstream world, but
truthfully, it does not. Rather, its believers reside in a different
universe -- one dominated by an evil government and a conspiracy to
destroy America. Agents of the dark side lurk in every gathering, pawns
embodied in every disbeliever. Proof of this hidden reality can be found
in everyday news stories and ordinary documents, if only seen with the
right eyes.
The alternative reality that becomes life in the Patriot movement is
like a big quilt, a patchwork of factual items -- United Nations
reports, government documents, news stories -- that are patched together
with other less credible information -- black helicopter sightings,
suggestions of troop movements, and the like. The thread that weaves
them all together is a paranoid belief in the vast conspiracy; even if
items don’t appear to fit together, the irrational fear driving the
movement will overlook potential conflicts.
Everyone is free to make a
contribution: a military-vehicle sighting here, an obscure document
there. Believers are free to ignore some patches if they happen to
disagree with any singular contribution, so long as the quilt itself
hangs together as an all-encompassing blanket.
The dwellers in this otherworld can be found not just in the wilds of
Montana among the most radical believers like the Freemen. They can be
found seemingly everywhere in the Northwest: in suburban conference
centers, in rural town halls, in small Bible study groups.
Step into one of the militias’ organizing meetings -- typically held
in small community halls in rural areas and towns outlying urban centers
-- and you will have walked into this world.
...
By challenging the mainstream view -- that the world is essentially a
safe place, that the nation is, in general, functional, even if it has
problems -- the Patriots persuade their followers to place themselves
outside the rest of society. Simultaneously, they offer a social
structure of their own, drawn together by a Patriot sensibility that
informs every aspect of the followers’ lives: legal, religious, even
business behavior becomes an expression of their beliefs.
This is how people are drawn into the alternative universe of the
Patriots, a world in which the same events occur as those that befall
the rest of us, but all are seen through a different lens. Anything that
makes it into a newspaper or the evening broadcast -- say, flooding in
the Cascades, or the arrival of U.S. troops in Bosnia -- may be just
another story for most of us, but to a Patriot, these widely disparate
events all are connected to the conspiracy. Believers tend to organize
in small local groups. They all have similar-sounding names -- Concerned
Citizens for Constitutional Law, Alliance for America, and the like.
They play host to the touring Patriots, the local leaders nervously
introducing their admired guests. These groups operate out of the public
limelight, on a low-level communications system: a combination of
mailings, faxes and even Internet postings all advertise the meetings
locally and regionally. Rarely does an announcement make the local
mainstream press.
Most of the Patriots’ real recruiting takes place before the meetings, by word of mouth. It usually works like this:
John, a Patriot, tells Joe, a co-worker at his plant who’s going
through a divorce, that he can find out ``what’s really going on’’ by
attending a militia meeting. The Patriots, Joe is told, have answers to
the moral decay that’s behind the way men get screwed in divorce cases.
Joe attends. He thinks the New World Order theories might be
possible. He buys a video tape, maybe a book. It all starts to fit
together. So this is why he hasn’t been able to get ahead in the world
economically, he tells himself. He attends another meeting. Pretty soon
he’s getting ``Taking Aim’’ in the mail.
Joe tells his neighbor Sam about the Patriots. Sam is dubious, but
he’s been having a hell of a time paying his taxes, and Joe passes on
what he knows about the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve
from the Patriot literature he’s read. Sam is intrigued. He reads some
of Joe’s material. He goes to the next meeting with Joe. A month or two
later, Sam starts drawing up papers to declare himself a ``sovereign
citizen.’’
Sam goes to a picnic outing at his parents’ house. His older brother
Jeff, an engineer at Boeing, asks Sam about the ``sovereign citizen’’
stuff. Sam explains. Jeff, too, is dubious, but he also happens to be a
gun collector and sometime hunter, and he’s received mailings from the
National Rifle Association that lead him to wonder if there isn’t
something to this whole militia thing. When Sam starts talking about how
the government is out of control, passing unconstitutional laws like
the Brady Bill, Jeff tunes in. A month later, he, too, sits in on a
Patriot town-hall meeting.
One by one it builds. Any of a number of vital issues -- land use,
property rights, banking, economics, politics, gun control, abortion,
education, welfare -- can serve as a drawing card. In many cases, they
are deeply divisive, polarizing matters that the mainstream fails to
adequately address.
Once recruits pass through any of these gateways into the Patriot
universe, they are drawn further, inexorably. What once seemed like a
screwed-up government has become monstrously, palpably evil. Then they
learn about Patriot legal theories from people like the Freemen or from
Schroder and DeMott:
* The Federal Reserve is bankrupt, a front for a phony system, run by
private
corporations, of printing money that really only helps keep
rich bankers awash in cash.
* The Internal Revenue Service is illegal. Federal taxes actually are strictly voluntary.
* You can exempt yourself from paying federal taxes by filing a
statement declaring yourself a ``sovereign citizen.’’ This ostensibly
frees you from obligation to the United States -- which Patriots say is
just an illegal corporation based in Washington, D.C. -- by nullifying
your participation in the federal citizenship status established by the
14th Amendment.
* This distinction, arguing that only the 14th Amendment extends
federal citizenship to minorities, forms the basis for the Patriots’
contention that only white male Christian property owners enjoy full
citizenship under the ``organic Constitution.’’
* In fact, the only valid U.S. Constitution is this ``organic
Constitution’’ -- that is, the main body of the Constitution and the
first ten amendments, or the Bill of Rights. Patriots believe the
remaining amendments either should be repealed or were approved
illegally anyway. In any case, they would end the prohibition of slavery
(13th Amendment); equal protection under the law (14th Amendment);
prohibitions against racial or ethnic discrimination (15th Amendment);
the income tax (16th Amendment); direct election of Senators (17th
Amendment); the vote for women (19th Amendment); and a host of other
constitutional protections passed since the time of the Founders.
* Establishing ``sovereign citizenship,’’ or ``Quiet Title’’ (which
similarly declares a person a ``freeman’’), exempts a person from the
rules of ``equity courts,’’ which means you don’t have to pay for
licenses, building permits, or traffic citations, not to mention taxes.
* The only real courts with power are the ``common law’’ courts
comprised of sovereign citizens, which have the power to issue rulings
and liens against public officials they deem to have overstepped their
bounds. If these officials fail to uphold the common-law courts, they
can be found guilty of treason, and threatened with the appropriate
penalty: hanging.
It is at this end of the Patriot universe that much of its deeper
agenda is revealed. When Patriots talk about ``restoring the
Constitution,’’ what they often have in mind is a campaign to roll back
protections embodied in a wide range of amendments, as well as
establishing a reading of the Second Amendment radically different from
the one traditionally accepted by the U.S. court system.
It also is at this end of the universe that the charges of
divisiveness and racism often leveled at the Patriots take on some
weight. Plainly, the constitutional rollbacks would return the American
system to a time when racial justice was not a considered concept.
Not
surprisingly, this is where the Patriots most closely resemble, and
arguably are directly descended from, openly racist and anti-Semitic
belief systems like those found in the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations,
and the Posse Comitatus.
Most of these views are often dismissed by the mainstream legal
profession as simple nonsense promoted by crackpots. And for the most
part, the Patriots’ legal theories completely disintegrate when
factually examined in the cold light of day. Nonetheless, the movement’s
ranks continue to grow, and the mainstream courts, particularly in
rural jurisdictions, now are faced with a sudden deluge of ``common
law’’ documents that throw an already overburdened system into a tangle.
All the same, there is no law against being a crackpot. Otherwise,
hundreds of Elvis sighters and UFO abductees would be rotting in prison
cells alongside the Patriots, most of whom also are quite free to spread
their conspiracy theories. The concern, rather, is what happens when
the agenda of the Patriots, constructed out of an insular, paranoiac
view of reality, tries to assert itself in the mainstream world. If
their form of ``republic’’ comes to be, most of society’s current
protections against racial injustice would vanish.
Believers’ attempts
to effect this agenda is certain to come into real conflict with
mainstream Americans. Moreover, when Patriots begin to threaten public
officials with hanging and other kinds of bodily harm, the potential for
violence enters into the picture.
``What is going on in our society when somebody can come up with an
idea like this, and a package of materials like this, and attract 200
people to a community meeting?’’ wonders Ken Toole, director of the
Montana Human Rights Network. Toole has attended many of the sessions.
``To me, it's almost like a canary in a coal mine, and it's very
indicative of how negative and hostile we've become about ourselves --
that somehow these people have managed to objectify the government at
all levels, blame it for all kinds of things, and look for a way to kind
of focus that anger.’’
