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
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 [human silhouette targets] 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.
This is how Patriot Academy began: not as a handgun training course or any of the other things the outfit would eventually become, but as a summer camp for politically minded students between the ages of 16 and 25. Once a year, approximately 30 ambitious youngsters spent a week in the Texas Capitol building, where they participated in mock legislative sessions, received leadership and activist training from notable local Republicans, and learned about how America’s roots trace back to a deeply Christian founding and to religious men such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
At a constitutional defense course hosted by Patriot Academy in New Braunfels, Texas, in early December 2022, participants practiced a drill training them to shoot from the hip in close combat stance, imagining they’re within a few feet of their possible target.
Note: The marked target areas of Bob to shoot at are body parts you shoot to kill
That dubious tale of America’s origins appears to come courtesy of David Barton, the man who put up the cash for Patriot Academy’s founding. Barton, whose academic qualifications consist of a
large collection of revolutionary documents and a bachelor’s degree in religious education, has written over a dozen books on America’s biblical roots, including one
pulled from shelves for factual inaccuracy after outcry from fellow Christian historians. In Barton’s defense, it is very difficult to prove that Thomas Jefferson, infamous Deist and slave owner, was both deeply Christian and a civil rights pioneer.
Rick Green would not approve of my sarcasm. “You [said] David Barton teaches that America was founded on Christian principles,” he told me when I pulled him aside for an interview four days into the Constitutional Defense course. “I argue there’s no question. America was founded on Christian principles. You read the Founding Fathers, 95 percent of them were Christians. Even the ones that weren’t Christians were still believers in God.”
One thing no one can dispute is Barton’s decades-long influence on evangelical conservative thought. He served as vice chair of the Texas Republican Party from 1997 to 2006 and has advised a variety of prominent conservatives over the years, including Newt Gingrich and Ted Cruz.
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And then the
Tea Party arrived.
Demand for all things constitutional skyrocketed; the organization’s donations quintupled in 2009 and continued to rise. As evangelical Christianity now surges back into mainstream political discourse, Patriot Academy finances are enjoying a second Great Awakening. Between 2017 and 2020, the group’s revenue nearly tripled. In 2008, Patriot Academy’s revenue was less than $29,000. In 2020, the group
collected $1.2 million.
These funds have not sat idle. Patriot Academy’s Leadership Congress camp for young people continues not just in Texas but in state Capitol buildings across the country. A separate series of leadership congresses for veterans kicked off in 2017. Slickly produced video courses, with names like Constitution Alive! and Biblical Citizenship, allow students of any age to learn Barton’s worldview in living rooms and churches throughout America.
Through it all, an undercurrent of concern carries students toward a worrying conclusion: America currently teeters on the brink of godless authoritarian communism, and only something as radical as the well-funded and rapidly growing conservative effort to rewrite the Constitution can save it.
Patriot Academy’s description of the Constitutional Defense course makes it clear that the handgun training and constitutional education are complementary, but separate. I was skeptical. In an era where right-wing talk of civil war is never more than a mouse-click away, who would we be preparing to shoot?
The course, designed for people of varying skill levels, starts with the fundamentals and works its way up. We do not fire a shot until halfway through the first day: It is all about safety, stance, loading, and unloading. Only after the instructors are satisfied that we are not going to do anything stupid do we begin to put holes through Bobs.
Hollywood has lied to you. Accurate shooting requires finesse and skill and an almost pathological attention to detail. It is easy to get lost in the mechanics of it: Weaver stance, bladed feet, bend your knees, sight picture, trigger pull, move, assess, reset, reload. Add in shooting from the holster and a focus on speed, and the act becomes so ritualized that you can easily forget that, ultimately, you are learning the most efficient way to kill another human.
Constitutional Defense never lets its students forget the point of handguns for long. Except in two accuracy drills, our targets are exclusively human-shaped. This makes me uncomfortable. I think it is supposed to.
