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: