Tactical Civics, a self-described Christian, constitutionalist group seeking to establish civilian militias and grand juries in all counties across the United States, appears to be ramping up its activities in Jefferson County.
The county chapter of the national organization, which has maintained a presence in Whitehall since 2021, began holding monthly meetings in March at the Jefferson City Community Center. It said it intends to continue operating from Jefferson City as it tries to build membership and momentum.
Varied interpretations of the group’s messaging and political aims has sparked concern over its presence in Jefferson City, and is part of a national conversation about anti-government organizations and the methods they use to effect social change.
“The meetings are introductory, in hopes of gathering folks of like interest and concern into a larger body,” said local Tactical Civics organizer Greg DeVries, a Jefferson City resident who represented House District 75 in the 2021 State Legislature. “It all begins with repentance towards God, and continues with folks taking up their mantles of responsibility. Our goal is to establish chapters in all 3,143 counties.”
Tactical Civics claims that it operates in nearly 1,700 counties, with a total membership of roughly 7,500 people. According to the group, 2,500 of those people have joined the organization in the past three months, suggesting a growing interest in its messaging and political objectives. Tactical Civics, which is headquartered in Texas, claims 400 members across Montana, with, according to the group, an undetermined number of those coming from Jefferson County. Only five people attended the group’s April meeting in Jefferson City.
“Our goal in each county is to get one-half of one percent of the population of that county to join Tactical Civics,” said DeVries at the meeting. “For Jefferson County, that’s maybe 60 people. Montana’s Madison County is actually the first county in the United States to achieve this goal. We are growing here.”
Tactical Civics focuses on the “one-half of one percent” recruitment goal, according to the group’s literature, because it has determined that is the minimum participation required in order to pressure county governments to adopt its “constitutional enforcement and militia ordinance,” which is the vehicle it intends to use to establish civilian grand juries and militias across the United States.
The group focuses on three interventions it believes will alleviate government corruption and overreach: the formal establishment of civilian grand juries in each county, the creation of county militias and their incorporation with local law enforcement agencies, and the passage of a constitutional amendment that would limit the number of citizens a U.S. House district might include to 50,000 and greatly expand the number of representatives in Congress.
The group hopes to pair the constitutional amendment with what it calls the “Bring Congress Home Act,” which would, among other changes, prevent members of Congress from maintaining offices in Washington, D.C. and force them to telecommute from their home districts, cut Congressional salaries in half, and create a two-term service limit for all federally elected officials.
Tactical Civics, while unique among anti-government activist groups in that it seeks to establish militias in cooperation with county governments, still deploys conspiratorial and violent messaging in its literature and educational materials akin to other, more radical groups. The second volume of its three-part handbook states: “Even if the forces of Obamanation and the turncoat element of U.S. military are joined by Communist China or Russia, honorable American forces will join with Militias that will rise up overnight and we will fight to the death for our homes and families — and win — if it comes to that.” The materials also challenge US election integrity and the outcome of the 2020 election, and call to “arrest DC and state palace organized crime [and] ratchet back the Deep State.”
Travis McAdam, a senior analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) who studies anti-government organizations, says that, while Tactical Civics utilizes Christian identity-based language and heavily invokes scripture, it cannot be classified as an explicitly Christian Nationalist group. Tactical Civics has yet to receive any formal designation as an anti-government group from the SPLC, and, according to McAdam, it seemingly fails to meet SPLC’s criteria to qualify as a hate group.
“Historically in the militia movement, since back in the early ‘90s, a lot of groups, especially in the Pacific Northwest, followed something called Christian Identity, which is a very racist and anti-semetic interpretation of Christianity,” said McAdam. “I have not seen anything that indicates that Tactical Civics is identity based, or targeting specific social groups. They are, as of now, strictly anti-government.”
McAdam also said that part of Tactical Civics’ national recruitment success comes from its ability to obfuscate core accusations and specific calls to action against the government, which has allowed it to maintain a greater social media presence than other, more aggressive groups and avoid online deplatforming.
“They present themselves in their promotional materials as merely facilitating a theoretical discussion about history and the Constitution,” said McAdam. “But then you go to the meetings and you hear a lot of really bad revisionist history, and a lot of really bad legal theory. And you can point to this plan they have to get rid of a lot of elected officials, but they haven’t been deplatformed because they haven’t been quite as blatant or public with it as in the past with other groups.”
As an example of the historical revisionism described by McAdam, a video released by Tactical Civics parent organization, the AmericaAgain! Trust Foundation, describes the American Civil War as, “the war to enslave the State,s” and accuses public schools of erasing the true history of constitutional law in the U.S.
It also claims that “D.C. Programming” in schools has caused children to revere Abraham Lincoln as America’s greatest president, and that, after the Civil War, “posing as the liberator of slaves, a powerful new federal government enslaved the formerly sovereign people and states that created it.”
While Tactical Civics has already created draft legislation, step-by-step action plans for county charters, and procedural documents for the creation and governance of local militias, it has yet to successfully implement its policy goals in any county in the United States.
