Perhaps I am a little sensitive to the portrayal of white men as crackers and such. The last survivalist living in a shack in the woods I remember was a leftist, the Unibomber, Ted Kazinsky. And, there was those environmental "terrorists" burning down places. But they also were white males. As for the right wing types, I don't recall a comparable amount of mayhem from them.
Probably because they are hiding in underground bunkers. Out of sight, out of mind. Still I maintain that it is the wealthy that are building bunkers, not impoverished rednecks.
I don't see Ted Kazinsky as survivalist type. I saw his house on the back of a truck the day they hauled it through Missoula MT, so they could have it as evidence for his trial in California. I also drove up there along Hyw 12 to see the place it stood. It was just hidden in the woods, not fortified in any respect. And it was so small, and the walls so thin, that an attacker could have easily walked up and shot a handful of rounds right through his walls and they would been very likely to have hit him.
My cabin about 25 miles south of there had a floor hatch in every downstairs room, dropping into the crawl space, and there were to two escape tunnels from there under ground.
One tunnel opened into a deep grease service pit under the floor of the garage and shop, about 50 feet away. The other went down a hill and came up in a cluster of large rocks and brush, about 50 feet in the other direction. The walls of the cabin were thick and would stop a bullet. The windows had stout shutters, and the doors could be barred from the inside.
I bought the place and had been living there about a year before I discovered the tunnels. The neighbors said the fellow who had been living there before me had been a pot grower. I met the guy and would have categorized him to be basically a liberal.
The person who dug those tunnels could have also been the fellow before him, who they all said was a bit odd and paranoid. I thought that among my neighbors, some were a bit odd and paranoid myself, so that fellow must have been twice as odd and paranoid. All of my neighbors living at the end of the road, there in the woods were Republicans.
There was this fellow up north a bit, a Conservative or Libertarian, who had been holding the sheriff at bay for two or three years. He shot a sheriff deputy one morning climbed in his car and went home. From there he threatened to shoot any sheriff who dared to come onto his place to arrest him.
The Sheriff kept him holed up there and contained, and waited a couple of years until he lowered his guard, and then one morning they bagged him unharmed in his yard. I thought that sheriff was acting very sensibly.
And there was also that religious bunch, a kind of Mormon like group, over in eastern Montana, who had a month long stand off with the FBI while I was living there in the state.
And there was that woman and her kids up in the hills who disposed of her husband and the children's father, a hunk at a time through the wood stove. The boy had shot him, but they all helped carve him up. When the word got out, the locals and sheriff pretty much agreed, that fellow really deserved it and had it coming, and so they basically let them go. ...
