If the antitax network of right-wing groups provided an expanded base for the burgeoning Patriot movement, the farm crisis helped solidify its foothold in rural America. Despite pastoral images of rustic agrarian life in America's heartland, where virtues of tradition, family, and hard work are thought to prevail, there is a disturbing history of “rural radicalism” that has fostered populist movements from the Shays' Rebellion to the American Agriculture Movement (Stock, 1996). According to Stock, rural America has always been defined by such traits as antiauthoritarianism, antielitism, deep suspicion of big business and finance, localism, fierce independence, and a certain contempt for federal government that have nurtured a “culture of vigilantism.” In the latter half of the 1970s, broad change processes imposed severe economic hardships on farm families that Posse activists effectively exploited to appeal to rural America's culture of vigilantism and latent hostilities toward government. Seizing upon the perceived threat posed by inflation, rising interest rates, heavy loan debts, and declining prices in farm commodities, Posse and Identity leaders framed the problem as a conspiracy of state elites in collusion with an international cabal of Jewish bankers and socialists intent on expropriating farm properties and subjugating patriotic Christians under the New World Order. The farm crisis not only produced a substantial pool of aggrieved farmers, it opened up new political opportunities for movement entrepreneurs to expose the vulnerability of political elites and forge new alliances, fomenting and harvesting rural radicalism.