Opinion: Militias 'hunting FEMA' echo a terrifying violent mindset from NC's past

For me, one of the more surreal pieces of news to come out of post-hurricane North Carolina was this: A U.S. Forest Service staffer relayed a report of truckloads of armed militia members “hunting FEMA” relief workers.

While a spokesperson for the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office later said deputies found no groups of extremists traveling by truck to murder Federal Emergency Management Agency personnel, officers did arrest a heavily armed man with apparent militia ties, saying he threatened to hurt FEMA employees.

Talk of militia activity might seem to track with the morass of fantastical misinformation that has bubbled up after Hurricane Helene’s devastation of western North Carolina. (Those bizarre rumors include that the government geoengineered the storm to seize lithium deposits under the ruined town of Chimney Rock.)

But militias and violence by those sympathetic to them are not new to the region and include a particularly notorious former resident whose history has stuck with me – Eric Robert Rudolph, a far-right extremist who pleaded guilty to killing two people and injuring more than 150 in a series of 1990s bombings.

In 2003, I got a firsthand glimpse of the social undercurrent that likely helped spawn Rudolph’s domestic terrorism spree. It’s why I winced when I read this month how Rutherford County deputies charged William Jacob Parsons with going armed to the terror of the public. The Bostic resident had said he planned to “go mess up some FEMA personnel,” a witness told officers.

Now out of jail on a $10,000 bond, Parsons was found with an AR-style rifle and two handguns, authorities said. He also appears to have posted the logo of the Three Percenters right-wing militia group on social media with the message “When tyranny becomes law, rebellion is order.”

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'Militia' extremists aren't new to Appalachia

To be clear, paramilitary extremism isn’t unique to the southern Appalachians. Michigan militia members participated in the 2020 plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and Oath Keepers militia leaders were convicted for roles in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

There are now fears that militias will disrupt upcoming elections.

But the southern Appalachia region, which ironically is home to the liberal free-ranging city of Asheville, does have a particularly dubious history of militias in its less-populated parts. That’s because of accidents of geography and history, the Southern Poverty Law Center says, pegging the local militia movement’s birth to the 1972 arrival of Nord Davis Jr., the patriarch of the racist Christian Identity religion.

Davis moved from Massachusetts to Macon County, North Carolina, attracted by its moderate climate, low taxes and promise of a self-sufficient lifestyle, according to the SPLC.

Disciples followed, later starting their own groups, such as John Roberts with the Militia of East Tennessee.

Rudolph came as a teenager in 1981, when his newly widowed mother moved the family from Florida to Macon County. It was also his mother who took him to Missouri for a brief period to live with a Christian Identity congregation. He served a few years in the Army, then drifted in and out of white supremacist groups.

In 1996, a bomb went off at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, killing one person and wounding 111.

In 1997 another blew up at an abortion clinic in the Atlanta suburbs wounding more than 50. Another planned explosion that year injured five people at an LGBTQ+ Atlanta nightclub.

Then in 1998, a bomb at an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, killed an off-duty police officer and critically wounded a nurse.

Federal agents linked the terrorist killings to Rudolph in 1998. But finding him would be a lot harder. A five-year manhunt ensued in the rugged North Carolina mountains where Rudolph and his family still lived. The search ended, strangely, in 2003 when a rookie police officer in the town of Murphy found Rudolph rummaging through a dumpster.

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'Killing is killing' mindset has frightening echoes

As a reporter, I was in the wave of news media that swept into the area. For me, it was a strange homecoming. My grandparents had lived outside Murphy for years and as a child let me wander into the thick woods.

I returned to the church where my grandmother had taken me and interviewed the minister about Rudolph. I talked to business owners, people on the street and officials. Most said similar things: They were against abortion and didn’t like the idea of people not conforming to gender norms. But they didn’t condone Rudolph’s violence.

Yet not far outside downtown, you couldn’t miss the occasional bumper sticker saying “Run, Rudolph run.” Or the guy selling T-shirts that said “Eric Rudolph: 1998 Hide and Seek Champion.” I reminded myself that in the nearby town of Andrews shortly after the search started, someone shot eight times into the Southeast Bomb Task Force headquarters, barely missing a federal agent.

I hiked on the trails that Rudolph would have used to get in and out of his camp and decided to drive farther outside Murphy. It was the days before I had a smartphone and I got lost.

It started to rain. Spotting some people standing at the top of a driveway, I pulled up and asked for directions. The woman who answered was older and I couldn’t help but think of my grandmother. Pulling out my notepad I told her what I was doing and asked her the question I had asked so many people – about Rudolph, what he did, what she thought about it. I expected a similar answer.

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Without much hesitation, she said that officer Robert Sanderson, 35, who was working security when the remote-controlled nail bomb went off at the Alabama abortion clinic, killing him immediately – and nurse Emily Lyons, who was 41 at the time she was badly burned by the explosion and mangled by the flying nails – had chosen to be employed by a place that was “killing babies.”

“And killing is killing,” she said.

I scribbled down what she said, murmured some thanks for the directions and drove back quietly to Murphy – lost in confusion and heartbreak over what I had heard.

I still think of that encounter when things go dark, like when the militants tried to kidnap Whitmer or the Jan. 6 Capitol attack or, more recently, in 2022 when 10 people were killed at a New York grocery store by a racist terrorist determined to murder Black people.

Extremism or the ideas that support it have not gone away. I wish I could say they would. But on the verge of a particularly contentious election – and amid a natural disaster – things could get worse in North Carolina and the rest of the country. Much worse.

There are a few things that have kept us from going over the edge. Generally, it's a belief that extremism does not define us. And that we will deal with violent radicalism ? not with more radicalism and violence ? but with justice that stays within the guardrails of our institutions. To me, it looks to be our best chance.

Joel Burgess is the Voices editor for the USA TODAY Network.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Opinion: Militia hunting FEMA takes me back to Olympic bomber in NC