Militias, Patriots, and Border Vigilantes in the Age of Trump, por Jesse Walker (Reason):
If you remember the days when George W. Bush was president, that story may have given you a gust of déjà vu. Several civilian border patrols cropped up back then too, most famously the Minutemen. These weren't the first paramilitary groups to go hunting for unauthorized border crossers—that had been happening for decades—but the Bush years were a boom time for the practice.
That, in turn, was part of a larger pattern. When Bill Clinton was in the Oval Office, the social space that would later be filled by the immigrant-fearing Minuteman movement was filled instead by the government-fearing militia movement. When Barack Obama became president, the Minutemen fell into factionalism and '90s-style militias began to grow again. Donald Trump's reign has seen a new surge of border patrols by nativist vigilantes. What do these shifts mean?
The easy reply is that this is just a matter of which party occupies the White House: Camo-clad right-wing populists are more likely to be afraid of a Democratic president than a Republican one, so they turn their guns outward rather than upward when the GOP is in power.
There is truth to that, but it doesn't explain everything.
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