Undergirded by the twin pillars of racism and anti-Semitism, fear of communist subversion and advocacy of states' rights became the rallying cry of the radical right in the 1950s and 1960s. Part of the genius of Bill Gale's invention of the Posse Comitatus was the way in which he took these themes and repackaged them in pseudoreligious legalisms that emphasized individual and "natural rights." For decades, the Ku Klux Klan and its various allies had created social movements and sought political power based upon explicit appeals to racial purity and Christian Nationalism. Bill Gale was no less fanatical in his devotion to "white survival" or his denunciations of world Jewry. But Gale also fashioned an elaborate, American-sounding ideology that married uncompromising anti-Semitism, anticommunism, and white supremacy with the appealing notion of the extreme sovereignty of the people. By emphasizing the idea that white Anglo-Saxon Christians were joined together by natural and "lawful" rights that trumped those of a (racially) corrupt state, Bill Gale's Posse Comitatus reached a new constituency of conservatives who would have been reluctant to embrace an ideology that revolved solely around crude bigotry.

The continuing attraction of the ideas that Gale and others espoused, the criminal violence of their adherents, and the various opposition groups they encountered are among the main elements of this story. But examined here, as well, are deeper historical questions such as how and why congressional Democrats in 1878 outlawed the use of army troops to protect the rights of freed slaves by passing the Posse Comitatus Act. Although popular opinion holds that barring the military from enforcing civil law (except in unusual and extreme circumstances) is a hallmark of American civil liberties, the Posse Comitatus Act was motivated by obvious racism and voted into law without much genuine concern for the high ideals of Constitutional restraint on federal power. In this way, the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act was a precursor of Gale's belief that a group of private citizens was justified in arming themselves to resist federal laws they disliked, or in hunting down perceived enemies of the republic without "unlawful" interference by agents of the central government.

While this book recounts the birth of the contemporary Posse Comitatus and the development of the modern paramilitary right, it also explores the historical, social, and intellectual context for the ideas that motivated Bill Gale and fueled the movement he and others created. In short, it connects the Posse's ideas and values to centuries-old myths and prejudices, many of which survive to the present day. Although many pundits regard militia groups and their progenitors as fringe extremists, many of the core values and ideas that fueled such groups were shared by the majority of Americans until the middle of the twentieth century. It was not until the nation mobilized for war against Hitler's Germany, was compelled to assert moral superiority in the face of communism, and was challenged by the domestic conflict over civil rights, that it began the process of discarding the racial, religious, and nativist prejudices that had dominated its politics, society, and culture since before independence. And even today, millions of Americans still share the belief that the United States should be a predominantly Christian nation; that blacks breed crime and are innately less intelligent than whites; that interracial marriage should be against the law; that Jews are clannish, cunning, and too powerful for the good of the country (in addition to being Christ-killers). These and other essential themes of bigotry resonate well beyond the ranks of the far right. Added to this short list of prejudices is the vague but popular notion that makes millions of other Americans anxious about the future (despite the collapse of world communism): the idea that the nation is on the verge of relinquishing its sovereignty to a shadowy cabal of "globalistic" and "communistic" forces known as "the New World Order." And equally popular, if not more so, is the notion that citizens are obligated to arm themselves to prevent a tyrannical government from usurping their rights.

Gale's 1982 Kansas broadcast was carefully calibrated to appeal to farmers like Gordon Wendell Kahl, a sixty-three-year-old sometime mechanic and World War II veteran who was to become the Posse's most famous martyr. Wanted for violating probation in a 1977 federal income-tax case, Kahl responded with gunfire when U.S. marshals tried to arrest him outside Medina, North Dakota, on February 13, 1983. Two marshals were killed and three other lawmen were injured before Kahl escaped pursuers and disappeared into the right-wing underground. The first press accounts described Kahl as a "tax protester," but news stories soon reported that Posse and Christian Identity beliefs were behind his fatal run-in with the law. It took four months for the FBI to finally track him down in the hills of northern Arkansas where he was hiding out in the home of a fellow Posse member, Leonard Ginter. The Lawrence County sheriff, Gene Matthews, was killed in the gun battle that followed, as was Karl, whose body was burned beyond recognition after law enforcement agents pumped tear gas and diesel fuel into the residence, sending it up in flames-not an uncommon tactic when lawmen finally catch up with a heavily armed cop-killer who refuses to surrender.

Because Kahl was outspoken in his beliefs, Bill Gale said he was killed "because he was teaching this law of posse comitatus, and [exposing] the banking system and the reasons for the foreclosures in the farms, the result of the Federal Reserve System." Kahl's death gave rise to even stranger theories among his supporters, including claims that Kahl survived the shootout and was still in hiding. Official credibility wasn't helped by law enforcement spokesmen who denied that the Ginter home had been intentionally set on fire. When a New York Times reporter came to see what was left of the safehouse several weeks later and stumbled-literally-on the charred remains of Kahl's foot, the grisly discovery reinforced bizarre theories about his fate. According to Richard Wayne Snell, a Posse sympathizer who claimed to have been a courier for Kahl, Sheriff Matthews was killed because he had interrupted federal agents in the process of dismembering Kahl. "They cut off Kahl's toes and hands, torturing him to tell who had been harboring him," Snell declared. When Matthews told federal agents to stop torturing Kahl because they might have "the wrong man," they shot the sheriff thirteen times, Snell claimed.

Enraged by Kahl's death, and inspired by frustrated farmers who set November 1, 1983, as the date for a symbolic protest against low crop prices, Snell decided to mark the so-called "farm revolt" by blowing up a natural-gas pipeline outside Fulton, Arkansas. He and two accomplices used two dozen sticks of dynamite, but the explosion only dented the pipe. Like Gordon Kahl, Snell was an Identity believer who used religion to justify his crimes. Ten days after the botched pipeline bombing, Snell robbed a Texarkana pawnshop. Snell often robbed pawnshops because he believed the owners all were Jewish and "deserved to die." He would then deliver the stolen goods and money to a paramilitary compound in northern Arkansas dedicated to white revolution, The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA). According to James Ellison, leader of the Aryan encampment, Snell had been "sent by God to help the CSA by stealing." In the Texarkana robbery, Snell killed the pawnshop owner, William Stumpp (an Episcopalian). The following year, on June 30, 1984, he killed Louis Bryant, a black Arkansas state trooper. Sentenced to life without parole for the Bryant murder, Snell received the death penalty for shooting the pawnbroker.

Snell's execution took place on April 19, 1995, almost twelve years after he killed William Stump and the same day as the blast that demolished the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. While most observers credit the burning of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, two years earlier on exactly the same day, with prompting McVeigh and Nichols to bomb the Murrah building, some knowledgeable observers in law enforcement and elsewhere have speculated that Snell's 1995 execution also motivated the Oklahoma City bombers. In the months leading up to Shell's execution, his wife had pleaded with supporters to inundate Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker with clemency requests. Her appeals were circulated by right-wing groups across the country, including the Militia of Montana, which printed her entreaties on the front page of its December 1994 newsletter, Taking Aim . Under the headline "An American Patriot to be Executed by the Beast," Mary Snell's letter asserted that her husband's cold-blooded murder of Louis Bryant had been an act of self-defense. Three months later, as Snell's execution neared, the Montana militia group ran another communiqué from Mary Snell and highlighted the significance of the April 19 execution date. In its message, the militia underlined that Snell would be put to death on the anniversary of the "burning of Lexington [Massachusetts]" by the British and the incineration of the Branch Davidian compound at Waco. Other right-wing activists later noted that exactly ten years earlier, on April 19, 1985, a large contingent of lawmen had commenced a siege of the CSA compound in Arkansas. In the militia newsletter, Mary Snell also made another calendrical connection: "April 19 is the first day of a weeklong sacrificial preparation for the GRAND CLIMAX ceremony celebrated by those who follow the Luciferian religion."