Militias have gotten a bad name in recent years. The very mention of them seems to trigger a horror of their supposed intentions to revolt against the government.
Why?
Is it because the government has declared a monopoly on citizens organizing to defend themselves and their communities? Brought heavy criminal action against anyone working with a non-governmental group that is dedicated to protection of nearby citizens against violence? Or, has the idea become corrupted by the actions of a few outliers?
Or, all of the above?
As they have traditionally been.
Almost all of the State Guards have been brought into the umbrella of the National Guard (SC is an exception – it still maintains a state-sponsored Home Guard).
Those entities are filled with younger men and women. Their periodic training is geared primarily towards short-term local defense, disaster drills, and, over the last 20 years, periodic use in the many foreign actions the federal government wants to conduct, without having to call up a draft.
But, they cannot and do not protect the neighbors from government.
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Militias are vehemently opposed by the government for many of the same reasons are alternatives to standing police forces. The nation-state model is predicated upon the state (government) having a monopoly on the use of force, wherein only its personnel are authorized to use/project force. In return for agreeing to protect everyday people with the military and police, the population agrees to surrender many of its former prerogatives for self- and community defense.
Being only “use of force” game in town, the government enjoys a highly-profitable monopoly and racket in which the members of the populace are compelled to participate via their tax dollars, even if they do not wish to do so. At the national level, hundreds of millions – perhaps even billions – of dollars are at stake, not just at the DOD/Pentagon, but across the board at the federal, regional, state, county and local levels. The swag thereby gained is used to buy everything from jet fighters to armored personnel carriers for the cops.
Having a monopoly on the use of force also confers upon fed.gov the prized ability to punish/reward those with whom it deals. This dynamic has been on clear display during last 6-8 months of the covid outbreak and subsequent riots, arson and mayhem by Antifa-BLM-RevCon. “Privileged groups” like Antifa and BLM can run riot, literally getting away with murder – with few consequences, legal or otherwise, while law-abiding Americans whose only “crime” was to give their political support to Donald Trump are treated like the terrorists Antifa and BLM actually are. The late Sam Francis called this phenomenon “anarcho-tyranny” and he was utterly correct in his characterization.
The difficulty for everyday people is that the nation-state is deteriorating for a variety of reasons, and the U.S. is slowly but surely being turned into what historians and political scientists term a “hollow state,” i.e., one which maintains the appearances of normal functionality, but which is actually only a facade behind which criminality, corruption and chaos flourish. Which means that the military, police and fire department may or may not come to your aid when you need them -but don’t you dare even think of trying to encroach upon their business!