My Week Inside a Right-Wing “Constitutional Defense” Training Camp

An on-the-ground report on the movement trying to rewrite the Constitution—and arm supporters along the way

This Article Appears in The New Republic

“You’re at a gas station.” Firearms instructor Jamie LaBarbera’s voice crackles over the portable speaker system. “Out in the shadows, you see this guy walking up.”

We are standing at the firing line. The world is dust and sun and the kind of oversaturated deep blue sky possible only at high altitudes where the air is thin. Each of us stares down our own personal Bob, as the instructors have named him: a beige, featureless paper silhouette already pockmarked with holes.

LaBarbera, our handgun instructor, continues his story. “You can’t tell, but he’s got something in his hand. He’s getting a little close, you’re a little worried, you can’t tell what it is. Challenge!”

Our hands fly up, palms out in the universal signal for the thing we shout: “Stop right there!” The New Mexico prairie swallows the words without an echo.

“He keeps coming, but you don’t know what he has in his hand. Present!”

All down the line, we hear the click of handguns freed from holsters. They point at the ground, ready to come up at a moment’s notice. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

“It’s a knife!” LaBarbera shouts. “He’s still coming! THREAT!!”

No words this time, just the thunder of gunfire up and down the line. I take my time aiming to ensure I hit Bob where I’m supposed to: inside what the instructors call the thoracic cavity, where all the vital organs live.

I am approximately halfway through Patriot Academy’s Constitutional Defense course, a five-day program run by a right-wing organization that promises to give participants both “the physical training you need to be able to defend your family” and “intellectual ammunition to defend the Constitution.” It’s late September, and my classmates and I—a group of about 60 in total—have sent approximately 200 rounds through various forms of Bob over the past day and a half. There are 600 more rounds in the trunk of my rented Chevy Malibu, currently dwarfed by rows of pickup trucks in the parking lot behind our line of fire.

The idea of combining political instruction and 35 hours of intense, combat-focused pistol training in 2023 America seems insurrectionary on its face. And it is, but not in the immediately obvious way. The guns are a red herring. The insurrection, if Patriot Academy has its way, will be bloodless: a heart transplant for the body politic. Patriot Academy, along with many fellow-traveler evangelical organizations across the country, is engaged in a life-and-death struggle to rewrite America’s Constitution—and teaching its supporters how to defend themselves with a handgun, just in case.

Read the rest at The New Republic