n Sapp, who locates American-right extremism first with white supremacy as articulated in the KKK, neo-Nazism, Aryan Nations, and similar groups. Next comes the factor of assiduous insularity; the extremists are often survivalists who build fortress compounds and who may affiliate with a charismatic leader. Finally, there is the factor of religion, specifically, Christian Identity. These three areas of concern overlap and converge, for Christian Identity entails white ethnocentrism. (It does not, by the way, entail the values of New Testament thought, such as "love your enemies." The opposite is the case.) The point is that what one believes, not what one does, becomes of paramount importance.
As might be expected, holding such strong beliefs takes a good deal of energy, and over the course of the 1980s, the militia movement was in retreat due to nothing so much as lack of interest and meaningful marginalization. According to Steven Chermak (2002), the market of "social control" was not available to militia activists, as if they had little relevance to anything in the culture because they did not have a voice in its public discourse. What was required was a galvanizing incident. White cites three such incidents following relatively quickly upon one another.
If not for the passage of the Brady Bill some 10 years after its namesake had been wounded in an assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, militias might not have been regalvanized and joined by such bad actors as Timothy McVeigh, in the name not of white supremacy or Christian Identity but rather opposition to federal control. Antifederalism gained more momentum with the Randy Weaver/Ruby Ridge incident in early 1992, when the FBI laid siege to a survivalist who resisted service of a bench warrant. The incident escalated into gunfire that led to the deaths of Weaver's wife and son. The momentum was aggravated in early 1993 with the destruction of the Branch Davidian compound in ...