An Inside Look At A 'Tactical Civics' Seminar And The Plan To 'Take America Back'
A vision of a kinder, gentler Christian militia working in tandem with grand juries to bring "repentance" to our nation which was "founded in the name of Jesus Christ"
About 30 people gathered for Kittitas County’s first “Tactical Civics” meeting at the Masonic Hall in the tiny town of Roslyn, Washington on the evening of March 14. We sat on folding chairs facing a white wall where an image of the Washington State Flag and the Tactical Civics seal were projected. The seal, designed to look like the US presidential seal, had the words “Non Imperat Nobis D.C.” written on it.
It means, “You do not command us.”
The leader of the nascent Kittitas County chapter is Dan Johnson, and he opened the meeting by asking someone to say a prayer.
“Just so you know we are total 100% Christian based,” he said. “If you join, all the Zoom meetings and stuff, they pray before and after. There’s a whole prayer group.”
Tactical Civics is a new rightwing movement that blends elements of modern Christian nationalism, Covid-19, and 2020 election denialism with old-school John Birch Society anti-communism and xenophobia and adds fringe sovereign citizen political theory in to come up with something familiar but novel.
“This republic of sovereign States, founded in the Name of Jesus Christ and blessed for centuries, is now under Communist occupation by D.C., Beijing, and many state palaces,” the website reads. “The massive fraud in the 2020 election, combined with the criminal COVID-19 hoax were the work of criminals in the Deep State, DNC, Communist county machines and governors, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Communist China, Google, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MSNBC, CNN, FOX, ABC, CBS…destroying our economy and keeping Americans in concentration camps with no communication between us.”
Becoming a member costs $5 a month or $50 annually, and the private Christian political organization has chapters in more than 1000 counties across the country, Johnson said.
Their goal is to take America back from the “elites” and “creatures” in Washington D.C. who are nothing more than “organized criminals.” They plan to do this by empaneling grand juries made up of non-elites to investigate “the corruption” and empower new citizen militias with the authority to enforce the findings and decrees of the grand juries. The system was created by author and conspiracy theorist David M. Zuniga, who has written extensively on the subject and has books with lengthy titles like “Grand Jury Awake: Tactical Civics™ Primer on Grand Jury” and “The Great We-Set: How you can join Americans who are taking America back one county at a time, and enforcing the Constitution at last.”
According to Zuniga, law enforcement agencies other than militias are not constitutional – not even sheriffs – and the Constitution has never actually been enforced.
“Never. Not once. Believe it or not, not once,” he said on Alex Jones’ Infowars last August. “We need militias to execute the laws – that’s the only law enforcement stipulated in the Constitution.”
The only way for the constitution to truly be enforced is by grand juries and militias, he said. In his book and online he provides a diagram of how government should work, according to him.
“The grand jury is just part of a two-part system of government that goes back 1000 years in Anglo-American law,” he said. “If you go back, all the way back, you’ll see that 800 years before our Constitution the people were already sitting in grand juries and judging kings! We could still do that.”
But before that can happen, Congress needs to ratify what was originally the First Amendment. According to Zuniga, George Washington was actually our eleventh president and there were originally 12 amendments in the Bill of Rights, not 10.
“We’ve got our original first right in the Bill of Rights still standing open under Article V, has been for 234 years, still not fully ratified – it calls for US Congressional districts to be no more than 50,000 people,” he said.
I’m not sure what the claim that Washington was our eleventh president is based on, but he’s right that there were originally 12 amendments under consideration to become what would later be known as the Bill of Rights. And he’s right that original First Amendment would have made it so there would be one representative per 50,000 citizens. According to Johnson, that means there should be about 6,300 representatives in Congress. Zuniga said 6,500, and their math isn’t far off.
You can read more about that and the other failed amendment via Teachinghistory.org here. There are a lot of reasons why those two amendments didn’t make the cut, but what’s more important than diving down a history lesson rabbit hole is understanding that this type of historical factoid is a great place for a conspiracy to be hatched.
According to Zuniga, it was Alexander Hamilton who killed the amendment because he was a foreign-born banker and an elite who wanted to keep oligarchs in control of the country. He passed his knowledge on to Henry Clay who passed it on to Abraham Lincoln, and Lincoln is not a hero, according to him and at least a few people in the room. One woman spoke up at the meeting and encouraged others to take another look at Lincoln’s legacy.
He said Lincoln, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin “teamed up in one generation” to bring about the industrial revolution and turn Americans away from God.
You can listen to that portion of his interview on Infowars here:
Unlocking The Power of the People
The reason it’s important to get that long-dormant amendment ratified is because that would mean congressional representatives would have to return to their districts full time, vote from there and be accountable to the grand juries and the militias.
Why would increasing the number of representatives to more than 6,000 mean they’d all have to return to their home districts permanently?
“Because they wouldn’t in the house chamber,” he said. “So they’ll all come home and once they bring them home forever who is more perfect to do that, to sign that bill, than Donald John Trump? He would love to sign that bill. He would love to be the guy in history who finally – you talk about being able to get back at that monster that’s been trying to kill him – can you imagine him signing that bill?–”
He was cut off by the host mid-sentence there.
In fact that are many portions of the interview clearly edited out of the interview I found online, which you can watch here.
Comparing the Founder’s Message to the Follower’s
The interview with Zuniga is a major contrast to Johnson’s explanation of what the movement was about. At one point an older man who said he was a veteran interrupted and asked for the organization’s mission statement. But Johnson didn’t have a simple answer to that. What he was clear about was that this is a movement very much in “phase I.”
The current goal is to get to one half of one percent of people in every county in “the Republic,” to join he said. Once they do that they can go to “phase II.”
“We’re in all 50 states and that’s what we’re doing, we’re all getting to critical mass, one half of one percent in our county,” he said. “There’s 3,141 counties in the Republic and once everybody gets close to critical mass then they’re going to tactically move forward – there’s a set number, 100-200 counties at once.”
Tactically moving forward means assembling a grand jury, notifying county officials that it and the militia will be taking control over the administration of the government and courts, and somehow passing “ordinances” that make it legal. But it’s important for large numbers of counties to do that at one time so that no one county could be singled out by the feds, he said.
He didn’t say that means they would ignore the courts, or the sheriff, “or whatever,” but they would be compelled to obey the grand jury and the militia. The implication of some form of violent altercation with local, state and federal authorities was shrugged off and no detailed explanation to how these actors would be compelled to obey was given.
At one point, Johnson complained that militias have a bad rep because of negative portrayals in the media, film and television, and mentioned the TV show “Yellowstone” specifically.
“The Duttons are always getting chased by the militia, fighting with the militia, the militia is scary. But that’s not how it is. The militia is supposed to come help you when you need sandbags because it’s flooding,” he said.
He said in the future the militia will be just like “volunteer fighters.” The way he described it, grand juries and the militias that enforce their will be mainly interested in rooting out corruption and keeping everyone honest.
But Zuniga describes it differently.
“When the grand juries and militias start working together, now we can start going after the paid law enforcement – who are bent. We can go after the DA – who is bent. We can go after the judge – who is bent,” he said on Infowars. “We’re going to do this in phalanx – in about 100 counties from coast to coast all at once.”
There was no talk of violence directed at any group or individual directly, or any overt racism on display. In fact it seemed like distancing this new brand from imagery, symbols and even fashions traditionally associated with militias and extremist groups is a conscious decision. Zuniga is clearly interested in redefining what it means to be a member of a militia group and has sought to remove evidence that proves he and his organization promoted a more stereotypically aggressive and more overtly seditious style of militia membership not too long ago.
Last year, he asked the website goodreads to remove a book titled “American Militia 2.0: An American Militiaman’s Handbook” from their platform. According to the cover, that book was written by the “co-founder” of Tactical Civics, a man named John M. Leyzorek. Zuniga wanted to let people know that book and its author has been disavowed and to direct people to his own book on Amazon with the customarily sesquipedalian title “Time to Start Over, America: Introducing American Militia 2.0™- Restoring Our Founding Fathers' Law Enforcement, Riot & Border Control, and Social Glue.”
In Roslyn, Johnson opened the floor up for a Q&A session after we watched this music video for a song called “Country Grand Jury.” He said was filmed in Idaho and the singer is a Georgia native and member of the movement named Robert Lane.
At one point the question of letting non-Christians into the organization, and thus the grand juries and militias that will run the government, came up.
“Non-Christians can join,” Johnson’s wife Janie said. “But they can’t, you know, say anything bad about Christians or God.”
Someone also asked how they were going to keep “bad actors” out of the group. Johnson said they aren’t doing anything wrong, so what do they have to hide?
“Besides we’re all on a watchlist somewhere, right?” he said.
As far as the timeline to initiation of phase II, “they tell us to say we can go as fast or as slow as you want to go,” he said.
The key is getting to one half of one percent of the citizenry overall to join. By that time Trump should be president again he will almost certainly sign into law a bill that ratifies the original First Amendment and “drains the swamp” – forcing members of Congress to “come home” and be accountable to the people.
“A year and six months we should be at our target to start doing grand juries,” Johnson said.
Links and Sources
Citizen action group aiming to form militias and grand juries convenes at Vale library, The Malheur Enterprise, Oregon
We The People...Looking Into Tactical Civics, The Whitehall Ledger, Montana
The Great Reset conspiracy
What is the Great Reset - and how did it get hijacked by conspiracy theories?, BBC
Week: Why conspiracy theories haunt the World Economic Forum, The Week
David Zuniga
Tactical Civics Introduction w/ David Zuniga on Infowars Alex Jones Show
Introduction to Tactical Civics™ seminar - David Zuniga - America First Warehouse, rumble
“Christian” Taliban
As a retired Sheriff, I couldn't be more offended at this group's assertion that we are not to be trusted. We are the people's law enforcement. Count me out of your lunacy.