Militia gets battle ready for a 'gun-grabbing' Clinton presidency

JACKSON, Ga. — "Put the guns down!"

The order crackled over a loudspeaker from two sheriff's deputies crouched behind the doors of police cruisers, semiautomatic rifles at their sides.

Several middle-aged militiamen were toting loaded AR-15 rifles and 9 mm pistols at a makeshift checkpoint — two lawn chairs and a narrow board — on a dirt driveway in central Georgia. The men, members of the Georgia Security Force III% militia, grumbled but laid their weapons down on the red clay earth.

The brief standoff ended with an amicable chat, and the men retrieved their weapons the moment the lawmen drove away. But the episode further stoked the militiamen's abiding fears that their cherished Second Amendment rights are under assault.

The Georgia Security Force is one of scores of extremist militias nationwide that have rallied around the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, heartened by his harsh attacks on immigrants, Muslims and Syrian refugees. But no single issue motivates militiamen more than guns — and the enduring belief that Hillary Clinton is plotting to take them away.

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The Georgia militiamen mobilized in the piney woods here last weekend to fire weapons and train for the day when, they believe, they will be forced to defend what they call "our way of life." Two dozen armed men and women conducted live-fire search-and-destroy drills, pumping out enough rounds to saw through and topple a loblolly pine.

"We thought it was bad under eight years of Obama, but the gun-grabbing is going to get a whole lot worse if Hillary gets elected," said Chris Hill, 42, a blond-bearded paralegal who goes by the code name Blood Agent and commands the militia. He wore combat fatigues and packed a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol on his hip.

When Trump says he wants to make America great again, Hill and his roughly 50 local militiamen are enthralled. They long for an America they believe has been stolen from them by liberals, immigrants and "the PC crowd." Their America is one where Christianity is taught in schools, abortion is illegal and immigrants hail from Europe, not faraway Muslim lands.

These weekend warriors form the obdurate bedrock of Trump Nation: white, rural and working class. They vote, and they are heavily armed, right down to the .22-caliber derringer fired by Nadine Wheeler, 63, a retiree who calls her tiny gun "the best in feminine protection."

During two days of conversations, grievances poured forth from the group as effortlessly as bullets from a gun barrel. On armed excursions through sun-dappled forests, they spoke of a vague but looming tyranny — an amalgam of sinister forces to be held at bay only with a firearm and the willingness to use it.

They are machinists and retirees, roofers and factory line workers, all steeped in the culture of the rural South. They say Trump, a Manhattan billionaire and real estate tycoon, speaks for them.

"Within the extreme right, many of Trump's most passionate backers come from the militia movement," said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League. "The militia movement is overwhelmingly behind Trump's candidacy."

For militias, Trump's anti-establishment views "play right into their paranoid style of politics," said Ryan Lenz, editor of the Hatewatch blog at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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The Georgia Security Force is noteworthy among militias for its acute Islamophobia, Pitcavage said. Its members are so-called 3 percenters, who believe that only 3 percent of colonists fought in the Revolutionary War. That is "a historical myth," said Pitcavage, a historian, but useful for those who believe a few people with guns can defeat tyranny.

At least 330 such 3 percenter groups have formed in all 50 states, by Pitcavage's count. There were 276 active militias in 2015, Lenz said. The number includes some 3 percenter groups.

Trump has retweeted posts from white nationalists and Nazi sympathizers, but Hill and his followers insist that they are not racists, only staunch citizens and patriots with an admittedly apocalyptic outlook. They consider Trump a bulwark against the candidate they call "Shillary" Clinton.

Teresa Bueter, 41, worked for 26 years behind a hot grill at a Waffle House while raising three children. Now she is an active member of the Georgia Security Force, decked out in military fatigues. She owns a .32-caliber pistol and a German-made sniper rifle.

Bueter said Syrian refugees entering the country "scare the crap out of me." With her guns and the militia's weekend paramilitary drills, she said, she is prepared to fight for the values she has instilled in her children and three grandchildren.

"Donald Trump would fit right in with our little group," she said. "He wants America the way we want it, back like it used to be."

Firearms are central to their identities. In September, some Georgia Security Force members paraded with guns while protesting plans for a local mosque; one wore a T-shirt that read, "Islam Is of the Devil." Last year, armed Security Force militiamen rallied in support of the Confederate battle flag.

At their campground, militia members squeezed off several dozen rounds before breakfast. Then they sat down to scrambled eggs and sausage amid the lingering scent of cordite. Hill asked who was voting for Trump. Everyone shouted a unanimous "Oorah!"

The militia members seem comfortable inside the same sort of echo chamber of self-confirming arguments they ascribe to the liberal elites they say denigrate and demean them. They repeat tropes gleaned from militia websites and social media. They seem convinced that either the Islamic State, or agents dispatched by Clinton, or both, may soon descend on the woods of central Georgia.

In separate interviews, various militiamen shared the same conspiracy theories, almost word for word: Muslim refugees have established terrorist training camps on soil. The liberal billionaire George Soros has rigged voting machines for Democrats.

"We're like a small military of like-minded people," said Donald Ensey, 44, a father of four and grandfather of two, who wore fatigue pants and a black T-shirt bearing a profane depiction of an Islamic State fighter and a goat.

Ensey, who has a 3 percenter logo tattooed on the back of his hand, said training with the militia was essential to securing everything he had worked for in his lifetime. Even if Clinton is not elected, he said, surely someone else will come for his guns.

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Hill, a Marine veteran, holds FTX sessions, or field training exercises, roughly once a month. Otherwise the members communicate via regular posts on Facebook. Prospective members are approved by a "review board" of current members who vet them on their compatibility with the militia's beliefs. This session was held on 14 acres owned by Devin Bowen, a machinist who was having a miserable day even before the deputies forced him to drop his pistol.

The door of his trailer — the one with a sign that reads, "If You Don't Live Here, Don't Come Here" — was smashed in earlier that day. Three rifles, a crossbow, 13,000 rounds of ammunition and an 800-pound gun safe were taken — not by federal agents, but by local thieves. Worse, Bowen was coughing up blood from an unknown malady. He soothed his throat by chugging cold Coca-Colas.

Bowen's comrades urged him to see a doctor, prompting a sour discussion about yet another conspiracy they see: the Affordable Care Act. Bowen waved them off. He was more concerned about Muslim immigrants' imposing Shariah law.

"You cannot come to my country and shove your religion down my throat," he said, coughing.

Phillip King, 25, who builds ductwork for a living, was outfitted in camouflage fatigues and a tactical vest holding ammunition clips.King, code name Cowboy, is the only African-American member of the Georgia Security Force.

He said he was not offended by the militiamen's affection for the Confederate battle flag. He shares their love of guns, their conservative values and their view of Trump as someone who will insulate them from the tyranny of the political left.

"This is my family — a brotherhood," he said.

For Daniels Potts, 21, owning a gun and learning to use it as part of a well-trained militia are essential to halting what he calls "the spread of radical Islam." He appreciates Trump's fierce opposition to Muslim refugees. "Not every Muslim is ISIS, but a lot of them are," Potts said.

He proudly calls himself an infidel and a deplorable. His arms bear tattoos of the 3 percenter logo and of the Kuntry Krackerz, a group affiliated with the Georgia Security Force.

Potts earns $16 to $18 an hour as a commercial roofer. He considers himself the type of law-abiding, hard-working American he said is belittled and marginalized by coastal elites. "We've been forgotten," he said.

Hill, the militia commander, led Potts and two dozen other members through a boot camp-style obstacle course carved out of the woods. They clambered over a wall of logs and fired at imaginary enemies as they "cleared" rooms made of plywood and sheets of black plastic.

One militiaman wore a shirt with a message that read, "When Tyranny Becomes Law, Resistance Becomes Duty."

It was all part of the militia's efforts to be armed, ready and united for looming threats, especially if Clinton is elected, Hill said. He mentioned his two children. "The security and safety of my kids motivates what I do," he said.

Hill, who calls his group a "defensive militia," predicted unrest and violence from extremists on both sides no matter who wins the presidential election. If Clinton wins, he said, millions of gun owners will march on Washington at the first attempt to restrict gun ownership.

"If the people decide they can no longer suffer the inequities," he said, "I'd be with the people and I'd take my guns up to Washington, D.C."