Intelligence Report,
Spring 2010
Midwifing the Militias
By Heidi Beirich
In 1910, prominent bankers and government officials convened a secret meeting on a stunning South Georgia key known as Jekyll Island. Gathering at a place that was once a haven for French privateers and, later, a playground for the rich of the Gilded Age, the group devised the plans that would result, three years later, in the creation of the Federal Reserve System, America's central bank.
Almost exactly a century later, in May 2009, some 30 "freedom keepers" — men who, like most members of the radical right, despise the Fed and see it as part of a plot to exploit American citizens — came together at the scene of the "crime" to wash away its sins. Meeting in the Federal Reserve Room of the luxurious Jekyll Island Club, they held an elaborate ceremony meant to symbolically "supplant the secretive deliberations" of 1910. Hoisted over the club as they met was the Gadsden Flag, with its coiled snake and cantankerous slogan, "Don't Tread on Me."
Convened by long-time radical tax protester Bob Schulz, who has been attacking the Fed and the Internal Revenue Service for decades, this remarkable gathering appears to have played a key role in launching the current resurgence of militias and the larger antigovernment "Patriot" movement. ...
~snip~
One of the most remarkable things about the little-noticed Jekyll Island gathering, which in some ways resembled another meeting that helped launch the militia movement of the 1990s, is how it brought together disparate elements of the radical right. It included radical tax protesters, militiamen, nativist extremists, anti-Obama "birthers," hard-line libertarians, conspiracy-minded Patriots with theories about secret government concentration camps, even a raging anti-Semite named Edgar Steele. Others, representing gun-rights absolutists and the far-right "unregistered churches" movement, were invited but sent their regrets.
That's not all. In addition to producing a whole series of "action plans to confront the violations" of the Obama Administration, the Jekyll Island meeting led to a number of other radical cooperative efforts. Most remarkably — and most recently — more than 100 delegates from 48 states traveled to St. Charles, Ill., in November to attend an 11-day "continental congress" planned at Jekyll Island and hosted by Schulz's organization, We the People (WTP). Given that it took its name from the gathering that was the first step toward the American Revolution, it isn't surprising that attendees felt, as one told a Pennsylvania newspaper just before the congress began, that it was "the final step before we have no other options."
~snip~
...It may well be, when the history of these years on the radical right in America is finally written, that the Jekyll Island summit, and the continental congress that followed, did more than any other effort to build the muscle of the radical antigovernment movement.
And that, judging by documents produced at the group's November congress, may well presage new dangers for the American public. The documents conclude that any infringement on the people's liberty as laid out in the Constitution is "an act of WAR" that "the People and their Militias have the Right and Duty to repel."
Cont'd:
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2010/spring/midwifing-the-militias
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