By Khalil Gibran Muhammad

As April 15 marks the second anniversary of the Tea Party movement, the burning question on the minds of many Americans is: Will anti-government activists use the ballot or the bullet to achieve their freedom dreams in the 2010 midterm elections?

In the wake of armed McCain supporters during the 2008 presidential race, and “strapped” town hall attendees last summer, the increasing threat of political violence in the nation has loomed ever larger. But what was first dismissed as political theater has now become a frightening reality.

Late last month, nine members of the Hutaree, a so-called Christian militia group that sees the federal government as the Antichrist, were arrested in FBI raids. The Hutaree planned to kick start Armageddon by assassinating a Michigan police officer, then, planting roadside bombs along the route of the victim’s funeral procession in order to kill – Baghdad style –as many cops as possible.

That they would use IEDs or improvised explosive devices, a key weapon in the arsenal of Iraqi insurgents, is more than a little ironic since these same people are often fiercely anti-Muslim. The Hutaree, on second thought, likely consider President Obama a Muslim terrorist, attempting to destroy America, as do the Birthers and legions of conservative talk radio listeners.

Despite Hutaree’s extremist means, they may not be so exceptional after all. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are 127 militia groups, a number that has grown 200 percent since a black man began his run for the White House. Over the same period the Tea Party movement began.

Coincidence? Not according to Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson: the Hutaree, like the Tea Party movement, he writes, reflect “broad based populist anger at political, demographic, and economic changes in America.” Much of the not-so silent white majority feel disenfranchised by a black president, a growing Latino population, and a Democratic Congress willing to re-slice the American pie so that citizens without health insurance receive their fair share.

And underneath the Tea Party’s anti-Big Government platform of fiscal responsibility, limited government, low taxes, and states’ rights are deeply entrenched notions of racial and class privilege, including the right to resist by any means necessary.

Shortly before the healthcare reform bill passed on March 21, during a massive Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill, protesters hurled racial and homophobic epithets at Democratic members of Congress. Georgia Congressman John Lewis was called the n-word and New York Representative Barney Frank, who is openly gay, was called the f-word. The next day bricks with “No Obamacare” carved into one side smashed through the windows of a New York congresswoman’s office. A few days later, a Nashville, TN man flipped into a rage, ramming his SUV into an Obama-stickered passenger vehicle, containing a 10 year old girl and her father. And Charles Alan Wilson of Selah, Washington told the FBI last week that he rarely leaves home without a concealed weapon, after being arrested for multiple counts of threatening to kill Senator Patty Murray.

Right-wing conservatives and some media pundits say these incidents are the work of fringe elements, extremists who don’t represent the legitimate grievances of law-abiding, gun-toting, hardworking, “real” Americans. The kind of everyday people self-identified as Tea Party Patriots whose websites, such as ncfreedom.us, promote the image of a nine-mm handgun with the words “Declaration of Independence” emblazed on the handle. True believers of Thomas Jefferson’s revolutionary rhetoric, these modern-day patriots embrace the literal interpretation of their Christ-like leader: “the Tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

The message here is hardly subtle. Real Americans must be willing to die for freedom. Just like armed soldiers for Christ will answer God’s call to destroy the Antichrist government, so, too, will Tea Party Patriots answer the Founding Fathers’ call to protect American Liberty.

At a recent Gaston, North Carolina rally, a speaker whipped up the crowd by asking, “How much is change workin’ out for you? What are you prepared to do about it? We the people need to take our states back.” It is “Time to take our country back.” This is standard rhetoric at gatherings large and small all across the country. Such veiled threats of violence are often masked by statements that “we will do what it takes within the law.” But what happens when the law is the problem? As it is to the Hutaree? Didn’t the British enforce the laws of colonial America? Do Gaston Tea Party activists really respect the law when the nation’s chief law enforcement officer is a black man who thinks America is a “nation of cowards” when it comes to dealing with our racist history?

And what exactly do they mean: take the country back? To what? Jefferson built America on slavery.

Maybe the country they want to take back is the same country where forty six years ago, during this same Doomsday tax month, another pro-gun rights, Patrick Henry-quoting, man of the people, expressed anti-government views: “If we don’t do something real soon, I think you’ll have to agree that we’re going to be forced either to use the ballot or the bullet. Anytime you know you’re within the law, within your legal rights, within your moral rights, in accord with justice, then die for what you believe in….It’ll be liberty or it’ll be death.” So said Malcolm X during his famous “Ballot or Bullet” speech on April 3, 1964.

Wasn’t Malcolm a Patriot, a freedom fighter for America’s highest ideals of liberty and justice for all?

We all know what many of the older Tea Party activists thought of Malcolm X then. He was despised as un-American, a hate-monger, a violent criminal, and deemed the ultimate threat to white Americans’ way of life. A way of life that for older white Americans depended upon a do-nothing federal government that refused to enforce the constitutional rights of black citizens.

Still clinging to a hypocritical, racial vision of limited government, today’s senior patriots call health care reform a “massive redistribution of the people’s money,” and carry Medicare and prescription drug benefit cards in their wallets. Not to mention, many of them came of age on white affirmative action—beneficiaries of government largesse under the GI Bill and Veterans Administration which disproportionately financed white homeownership.

Just like the lily-white suburb, the privileges of political violence to achieve “freedom” are for whites only.

When the Tea Party express stops in a town near you this week, and its speakers talk about the country they so desperately want to take back, ask yourself: How will they get it, the ballot or the bullet?

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is an Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University, and the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.