He’s dressed in military garb and combat boots, brandishing an AR-15 assault-style rifle, but Christian Yingling wants you to know he comes in peace.
After all, being a commanding officer of a citizens militia comes with its stereotypes, and after he was spotted in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend amid clashes between white supremacists and counter-protesters, he was quickly labeled a racist and an aggressor.
But talk to him at his home in New Derry, just outside Latrobe, and some of his words seem to come from a pseudo-camouflaged Mister Rogers instead of a 45-year-old militiaman.
“I’m taking the militia from being this anti-government monster and steering it back to where it should be: taking care of your community,” he said in an interview this week.
To understand the man who commanded a freelance army of 32 people in Charlottesville is to understand a man who, taken at face value, is fighting to change his image. Critics accused Mr. Yingling and his group of inciting violence in Charlottesville — posing as members of law enforcement to protect the political right and instigate the left.
It’s a criticism that Mr. Yingling detests; he said he’s a strict constitutionalist protecting free speech and the right to bear arms, and that he was in Charlottesville to protect everyone, not just white supremacists, whom he called “right-wing lunatics.”
But this is the same man, in the same gear, who is shown in a 2016 video recorded by a Facebook user claiming 26,000 terrorist attacks had been committed by Muslims since Sept. 11, 2001. “No other religion is committing terrorist attacks,” Mr. Yingling says to cheers at an anti-immigration rally in Harrisburg.
Mr. Yingling said he stands by those comments, but that he’s not anti-Muslim. In an attempt to set the record straight, he spoke passionately about the intentions of his militia unit, and also its strategy in Charlottesville and at other events. His comments paint a picture of a man with a different world view than his fellow militia members, but one that is grappling with actions that his critics say are antithetical to his public statements.
As the commanding officer of the Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia Laurel Highlands Ghost Company, based out of Latrobe, Mr. Yingling said he arrived in Charlottesville at 7:30 a.m. Saturday to command a regional group of militiamen at the request of the Virginia Minutemen militia. He said that over a span of five hours, his unit tried to work with police to control violence that broke out as a result of the university city’s efforts to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
“On a very small level, I can almost understand what Vietnam veterans felt like coming back,” he said of the criticism he got from both the left and the right. “We were out there to protect everybody. We were out there doing our job. We were not biased in any way, shape or form.”
Mr. Yingling said “all hell broke lose” as white supremacists and counter-protesters from militant groups such as Antifa, a far-left anti-fascist group, clashed. Police “chased” the militia out of Charlottesville about 1:30 p.m., threatening to declare its presence an illegal gathering. He said he didn’t mind leaving — what Mr. Yingling and his group saw was so “horrifying,” he wanted to get as far away from the city as possible — “I’m having nightmares about it,” he said.
He said he and the other militia members were gone by the time an accused white supremacist drove a car into a crowd of people, injuring several and killing a 32-year-old woman.
Mr. Yingling’s return home was met with a flood of insults on social media and death threats, he said. One user on Facebook instructed his militia to “shoot yourselves and save the police the trouble.” Mr. Yingling said he received the usual criticism from the left, but also from some on the right, who lambasted him for trying to protect left-wing groups.
He said most criticism stemmed from misguided assumptions about militias, a perception he is trying to change. He said he doesn’t support the Ku Klux Klan or white supremacists, saying in a Facebook video posted after his return, “They weren’t there to support southern heritage. They weren’t there to protect the statue. They were there to fight, and it didn’t take long.”
He said his militia isn’t anti-government, just anti-corrupt government. But the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center deemed the Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia an active “extreme antigovernment group” in 2016, one of 165 militias on the list -—a designation that Mr. Yingling called “asinine.”
Politically, Mr. Yingling said he is somewhere down the middle. His militia, however, is typically spotted at right wing events, including an anti-Shariah march in Harrisburg and in Gettysburg in July after reports emerged that Antifa was planning to burn Confederate flags. He said his militia chooses events based on the level of the threat of violence and the threat to free speech.
He said his comments about Muslims in 2016 were in response to former President Barack Obama’s immigration policies, and that not all Muslims are terrorists.
Mr. Yingling said people of color are welcome in his militia, though there were none in the group of militiamen he commanded in Charlottesville. He has criticized fellow militia members for making “gross blanket statements” about people they disagree with, and encouraged his peers to “sit down with them.”
“A lot of them have those theories that the government is just out to get everybody,” Mr. Yingling said. “That’s Alex Jones [stuff], man. Too many people watch him.”
Technically Mr. Yingling’s involvement in the militia started because of Alex Jones, the far-right radio talk show host who regularly touts extremist conspiracy theories. Mr. Yingling, who said he has struggled with drugs and alcohol throughout his life, wanted to devote himself to something “bigger” after watching one of Mr. Jones’ videos. Having served a short stint in the Navy in the early 1990s, he formed a group called the Westmoreland County Regulators in 2012 with a few friends, and conducted survivalist exercises in a nearby state park.
Once he agreed to command the statewide militia unit later in 2012, he said he “matured” in his ideology.
“We were all preparing for the day [the government would] take our guns, and we were going to disappear into the woods and make our own little colony,” he said. “Looking back on it now, God, it sounds so stupid.”
Now that he’s one of the most scrutinized militiamen in the region, he finds himself fighting more battles than one. But in Charlottesville, Mr. Yingling said he’s confident he did things the right way.
“We did what a citizens militia should do,” Mr. Yingling said. “We protected the community.”
Julian Routh: 412-263-1952 or jrouth@post-gazette.com, Twitter @julianrouth.
First Published: August 16, 2017, 11:30 a.m.
