MEP: At a militia training camp in Georgia it was clear that no issue motivates members more than guns — and the enduring belief that Hillary Clinton is plotting to take them away.
Down a Georgia country road, camouflaged members of the Three Percent Security Force have mobilized for rifle practice, hand-to-hand combat training — and an impromptu campaign rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
“How many people are voting for Trump? Ooh-rah!” asks Chris Hill, a paralegal who goes by the code name “Bloodagent.”
“Ooh-rah!” shout a dozen militia members in response, as morning sunlight sifted through the trees last weekend.
Several middle-aged militiamen were toting loaded AR-15 rifles and 9-millimeter 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.
They say they won’t fire the first shot, but they’re not planning to leave their guns at home, either.
Trump’s populist campaign has energized militia members like Hill, who admire the Republican mogul’s promise to deport illegal immigrants, stop Muslims from entering the country and build a wall along the Mexico border. Trump has repeatedly warned that the election may be “rigged,” and has said he may not respect the results if he does not win. At least one paramilitary group, the Oath Keepers, has called on members to monitor voting sites for signs of fraud.
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.”
They are machinists and retirees, roofers and factory line workers, all steeped in the culture of the rural South. They say Mr. 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, Mr. 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.
Trump’s candidacy has emboldened extremist groups to speak more openly about challenging the rule of law, said Ryan Lenz, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Prior to this campaign season, these ideas were relegated to sort of the political fringe of the American political landscape,” he said. “Now these ideas are legitimized.”
Over the past week, some prominent Trump supporters have hinted at violence.
“If Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket,” former Illinois Representative Joe Walsh wrote on Twitter last week. Conservative commentator Wayne Root fantasized about Clinton’s death while speaking at a Trump rally in Las Vegas on Sunday.
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