Political and religious extremism has been present for probably the same amount of time as religion and politics themselves and has recently become the focus of a lot of studies, research, and more of the extremists themselves than the phenomena, investigation. Just as appealing, it would seem, is a racist ideology that is so often an affiliate in the meaning system that extremists so deeply believe in. John Pitner, the focus of Lone Patriot by Jane Kramer, was an extremist who, along with his followers and the people whom he followed after, would have been proud to die in a resistance of the New World Order, who truly believed in his cause.
             From a cultural perspective, John was not abnormal, nor was his meaning system so far-fetched that it would immediately alarm you. He was not big on discrimination, as defined in 1998 in a compilation by sociologist Ken Wilson as the non-equal treatment of a person/s based solely on their membership in a social category, but he somehow maintained a rather ethnocentric view of the world. He didn't object to homosexuals, blacks, Jews, Indians or women.
             G. Myrdal, who wrote The American Dilemma in 1944, pointed out a typically formatted theory on the treatment of Americans. The first of two components is labeled preachment vs. practice, a concept in which everyone is treated equally and fairly, demonstrated by John Pitner saying in one of his pitches that the Washington State Militia welcomed "all races, religions, sexes, and things of that nature." This is where the second part of Myrdal's theory engages: ideals vs. reality. This is the part that recognizes that in reality people do not practice equal and fair treatment of each other; this is the part where John Pitner later describes a black man who showed up at a militia meeting to Kramer as an "attempt to infiltrate by a black individual." The ideals spoken of as essential and unquestionable, which seem so bas...