Sailorman wrote: The biggest movement in America and unreported by the media is the militia movement. Think why.
There is plenty of literature and media reports concerning the militia units.
The militia movement is a largely American subculture consisting primarily of disaffected, rural, white, right-wing Christians who believe that the federal government's authority is either broadly abused or outright null and void, and that the American people must form armed paramilitary groups in order to stand up to Washington and make their voice heard. The movement was mostly active in the early-mid 1990s, and appears to be making a comeback in recent years following the election of Barack Obama, though it is not as powerful as it was at its peak.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Militia_movement
While the movement is certainly on the rise, with quite a dramatic rise recently, it is not to the extent it was back in 1996 when around 858 groups were active ("Militias 'in retreat'". BBC News. May 11, 2001.) After the election of President Obama, small local militias began popping up again, as the Southern Poverty Law Center and others have documented. SPLC counted 1,360 active patriot groups in 2012, many of them militias.(The Nation 2013)
https://www.thenation.com/article/ameri ... ment-rise/There were at least 276 militia groups active in the United States last year, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center — a 37 percent rise over the 202 such groups in 2014.
http://thehill.com/policy/national-secu ... rapid-rate
Telegraph article - Alex Hannaford
Their opposition to federal government is what distinguishes them from the militias of old, which were designed to aid the government, rather than fight them, in the event of a national emergency. Indeed, according to civil rights organisation the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the militia movement claims to be the ‘militia’ enshrined in the Constitution but is not. The ADL says that they are simply private, unregulated paramilitary groups but that there is no federal law against their existence. (The Telegraph August 2010)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... itias.html
I think the reason why this is occurring is because the bottom 30% in the population, the so called "poor whites" feel disenfranchised, and disillusioned.
The worsening plight of poor white Americans highlighted by the Times article on the mortality findings by economists Angus Deaton and Ann Case is by no means limited to just the South and West. Researchers from political science to neuroscience have been uncovering ever more disturbing facts about whites at the bottom of the US socioeconomic ladder. Charles Murray, in his book Coming Apart, showed t
hat between 1960 and 2010 the bottom 30 percent of Americans in terms of socioeconomic status have experienced a collapse in social capital. The rate of children who were from broken marriages and living with a single parent increased tenfold over that period—to 25 percent. The rate of children living with both biological parents when the mother was forty years old plummeted from 95 percent to 30 percent. The fraction of people having no involvement in any secular or religious organization more than doubled—to 34 percent. The percentage of prime working age males not in the work force increased threefold—to 12 percent.
The percent of men not making enough money to support a household of two more than doubled—to 30 percent. The percent of males in state and federal prisons increased almost fivefold.
The disillusionment hypothesis has the virtue of explaining why it is that the support for Donald Trump is greatest today among ill-educated whites in the poorer, less cosmopolitan regions of the country. Trump’s bombast, braggadocio, xenophobia, aggressiveness, and willingness to tell baldface lies is unnerving to anyone having a nodding acquaintance with the circumstances of the rise of fascism. Both Italian fascism and German Nazism achieved their greatest initial successes with the proletariat. In the case of Nazism the greatest early gains were made with rural Protestant peasants.
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26561