The spectacle of heavily armed militias on the scene in Charlottesville last weekend ostensibly to provide security is no less troubling than the parade of alt-right, neo-nazi pinheads decked out as Aryan youth, sieg-heiling themselves into a frenzy in what might be viewed as a parody of a bad B movie if it were not so serious. At what point does this start to look too much like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia? Has it already?
When asked why police didn’t do more to stop the bloodshed, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe pointed to the riflemen strolling the streets. “It’s easy to criticize, but I can tell you this: 80 percent of the people here had semiautomatic weapons,” the governor said. “You saw the militia walking down the street. You would have thought they were an army … [The militia members] had better equipment than our state police had.”
Is it possible to have a functioning government and civil order under these conditions?
Casey Michel, How Militias Became the Private Police for White Supremacists, Politico, August 17, 2017