MILITIA 2

SEE THREE

new 619

see main

see bak

added MIC 719 since they use mil hardware, techniques and jargon/rhet (surplus?) many are vets

SEE OATHKEEPER INSURRECTION

ag21 pending

===

SOMEONE HAD THREE? PRONG APPROACH TO 2020 ELECTION, INVOLVED MASK LOCKDOWN PROTESTS?

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END OF DAYS IDAHO

Echoes of Conspiracy from Ruby Ridge to Today | Amanpour and Company

Amanpour and Company

1,357 views Feb 12, 2026 #amanpourpbs

The 1992 Ruby Ridge siege was an incident that shocked the U.S. The 11-day armed standoff in the mountains of Idaho between federal agents and the Weaver family ended in three deaths. In his new book "End of Days," Chris Jennings argues that the episode — rooted in apocalyptic, racist and anti-government ideology — helped pave the way for today's conspiracy-driven politics. Jennings joins the show to discuss the legacy of the widely televised event and what it reveals about America today. Originally aired on February 12, 2026

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AN 3 25

Former CIA analyst Holly Berkley Fletcher spent many years studying governments in Africa, and she paid close attention to the tactics used in the more undemocratic ones — tactics that included using violent groups to bully, strongarm and intimidate political opponents.

In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on March 14, Fletcher warns that the methods she observed in Africa are now being employed in the United States during President Donald Trump's second term.

Fletcher argues, "One of the great heartbreaks of the Trump era for me is seeing my expertise as an Africa analyst become relevant for understanding political trends in America…. As I was waiting for police to respond to a bomb threat at the Principles First conference last month in Washington, D.C. — the source of which is yet to be determined — I thought of yet another growing parallel: What technically would be called 'informal security forces' but what I, during my time as a CIA Africa analyst, colloquially called 'guys.'"

The former CIA analyst notes that in the African countries she analyzed, "guys" weren't shy about using violence against political opponents.

"When assessing risks to a country's political stability or the endurance of a dictator's power," Fletcher explains, "one of my first questions was always, 'Does he have guys?' They can be anything from a hyper-loyal faction of regular security forces to a specially commissioned 'presidential guard' recruited from a particular ethnic group to a rag-tag gang of young men armed on the cheap and on the down-low. Most recently, they could include hired mercenaries from Russia or other countries."

Fletcher cites specific examples of how "guys" were used in Africa — and could now be used in the U.S. under Trump.

"Most successful African political leaders in less-than-democratic systems have guys, from current dictators to wannabe dictators," Fletcher observes. "Any dictator worth his salt will cultivate independent armed factions to counter any threats from the military or other potential challengers' guys."

Fletcher continues, "Such groups have the added potential advantage of preserving the reputation of formal security forces in the eyes of the international community…. Sudan's former dictator, Omar al-Bashir, created the janjaweed in the early 2000s in an ultimately failed effort to distance his regime from genocide in Darfur…. Across the border, South Sudan is awash in militias formed by various aspirants for President Salva Kiir's job…. The late dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, had his Presidential Guard, but he also had his mob of 'war veterans' who terrorized his opposition in exchange for license to forcibly seize whatever farms they wanted."

The former CIA analyst fears that in the U.S., far-right groups like The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers could be used as "guys" by the MAGA movement.

"The most obvious blinking red light is Trump's mass pardon of the January 6th insurrectionists, including members of organized militias such as the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and the Thugs Formerly Known as the Proud Boys," Fletcher observes. "A court recently awarded their name to a black church they vandalized. Fresh out of jail, Enrique Tarrio showed up at the Principles First conference last month to menace former police officers Harry Dunn, Michael Fanone, Aquilino Gonell, and Daniel Hodges, who have been outspoken about their experiences fighting the mob on January 6th and who have been the targets of constant harassment ever since…. I was similarly horrified by reports that Elon Musk's private security force now has federal law enforcement authority via the U.S. Marshals Service."

*Holly Berkley Fletcher's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.

===

omfg

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/biden-trump/

A recent Washington demonstration supporting those charged with crimes for the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol fizzled, with no more than 200 demonstrators showing up. The organizers had promised 700 people would turn out – or more.

But the threat from far-right insurrectionists is not over.

For months, my colleagues and I at the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats have been tracking insurrectionist sentiments in U.S. adults, most recently in surveys in June. We have found that 47 million American adults – nearly 1 in 5 – agree with the statement that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president." Of those, 21 million also agree that “use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency."

Our survey found that many of these 21 million people with insurrectionist sentiments have the capacity for violent mobilization. At least 7 million of them already own a gun, and at least 3 million have served in the U.S. military and so have lethal skills. Of those 21 million, 6 million said they supported right-wing militias and extremist groups, and 1 million said they are themselves or personally know a member of such a group, including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.

Only a small percentage of people who hold extremist views ever actually commit acts of violence, but our findings reveal how many Americans hold views that could turn them toward insurrection.

A solid survey

[method grfx]

extreme beliefs

This polling found that 9% of American adults say they agree with the statement that “Use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency." And 25% of adults either strongly or somewhat agree with the statement that “The 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president."

Overall, 8% of the survey participants share both of those views.

The margin of error of this survey was plus or minus 4 percentage points. So when calculating the number of the 258 million adult Americans who hold these views, we looked at the range of between 4% and 12% – which gave us between 10 million and 31 million. The best single figure is the middle of that range, 21 million.

People who said force is justified to restore Trump were consistent in their insurrectionist sentiments: Of them, 90% also see Biden as illegitimate, and 68% also think force may be needed to preserve America's traditional way of life.

The fringe moving into the mainstream

Combined with their military experience, gun ownership and connections to extremist groups and militias, this signals the existence of significant mainstream support in America for a violent insurrection.

This group of 21 million who agree both that force is justified to restore Trump and that Biden is an illegitimate president has two additional views that are also on the fringes of mainstream society:

63% agree with the statement that “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites" – a belief sometimes called “the **Great Replacement**."
54% agree that “A secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is ruling the US government," which is the key belief in the QAnon movement.

Some people with insurrectionist sentiments hold one of these political views but not the other, suggesting there are multiple ways of thinking that lead a person toward the insurrectionist movement.

Broader support

This latest research reinforces our previous findings, that the Jan. 6 insurrection represents a far more mainstream movement than earlier instances of right-wing extremism across the country. Those events, mostly limited to white supremacist and militia groups, saw more than 100 individuals arrested from 2015 to 2020. But just 14% of those arrested for their actions on Jan. 6 are members of those groups. More than half are business owners or middle-aged white-collar professionals, and only 7% are unemployed.

There is no way to say for sure when – or even whether – these insurrectionists will take action. On Jan. 6, it took clear direction from Donald Trump and other political leaders to turn these dangerous sentiments into a violent reality. But the movement itself is larger and more complex than many people might like to think.

Robert A. Pape, Professor of Political Science, **University of Chicago**

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/members-of-the-oath-keepers-showed-preparation-and-structure-before-jan-6-insurrection-report/

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/trump-insurrection/

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/janice-mcgeachin/

In Idaho, Republican Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin — who is seeking the state's GOP gubernatorial nomination for 2022 — has generated considerable controversy because of her ties to extremist far-right militia members. The Guardian has obtained a copy of a video that, according to reporter Jason Wilson, shows militia extremist Eric Parker giving McGeachin's gubernatorial campaign an enthusiastic endorsement at a recent event.

In the video, Wilson reports, Parker can be seen "reminding" the 58-year-old McGeachin that she previously told him, "If I get in, you're going to have a friend in the governor's office." Parker is the leader of a militia known as the Real 3% of Idaho.

Parker became well-known in the militia movement in April 2014, when he was seen pointing a rifle at federal agents during the infamous standoff at the Bundy Ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada. Although he was facing federal criminal charges, Parker avoided the possibility of spending decades in federal prison by agreeing to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor charge. Parker came to be known as the "Bundy Ranch Sniper," which is considered a badge of honor in the far-right militia movement.

Wilson reports that in the video showing Parker endorsing McGeachin at an event in Idaho, Parker "tells the small audience that when he sought McGeachin's assistance in the case of Todd Engel — another Bundy Ranch attendee who was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2019— he showed her sealed evidence from the trial."

According to Wilson, the video shows Parker saying that McGeachin "started writing letters to the Department of Justice" on his behalf when he was incarcerated and was "rallying support" for him. And Parker says of McGeachin, "We need to do everything we can to get her where she can do the most good for us…. We got to get her in there for us."

Wilson explains, "Parker posted the speech video on his Telegram channel on 19 May, the same day that McGeachin publicly announced her candidacy for governor, where she may be up against the incumbent, fellow Republican Brad Little, who is yet to clarify his intentions."

Little was elected governor of Idaho in 2018, which was also the year in which McGeachin was elected lieutenant governor. Before her 2018 campaign, McGeachin had spent a decade serving in the Idaho House of Representatives.

Lindsay Schubiner, program director at the Western States Center, told The Guardian that it is "deeply disturbing" that a high-level figure in Idaho's state government has a "cozy relationship" with Parker. The Western States Center monitors extremist groups in the western United States, and Schubiner warned that McGeachin "has consistently sought the support and backing of extreme, anti-democratic movements in Idaho."

"No public official has any business advancing the agenda of an anti-democratic paramilitary group," Schubiner told The Guardian.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/republican-paramilitaries/

no lnx

ron Johnson said recently that he wasn't scared when, on January 6, armed insurgents sacked and looted the United States Capitol. They "love this country," the Wisconsin Republican said. But "had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa [stormed the seat of government], I might have been a little concerned."

That statement was disturbing not only for the implicit racism it carried, but for the stunning confirmation of what's becoming clear to those of us who are paying attention. The Republican Party has a paramilitary problem, and it isn't new.

During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump alleged, without proof, that the electoral system was fraudulent, raising concerns about the impact that his false accusations would have in the event of his defeat. His unexpected victory opened the door to the far-right fringe and legitimized efforts that contributed to strengthening the ties between them. Many feared that this close relationship would be critical in the 2020 presidential election cycle, with rising domestic tensions and the role that paramilitaries would play in addition to Trump's false claims about the election.

It has been clear for some time now that the Republican Party had a more-than-welcoming attitude toward certain paramilitary groups.The deadly events in Charlottesville in 2017, although fundamentally led by white supremacists called by the former president "very fine people," also had protection services provided by paramilitaries. The following year, more signs of backing for their man in the White House came from Trump-supporting paramilitary groups targeting Muslims. In Oregon, a walkout staged by Republican state senators, in 2019, gained support from paramilitary groups that made credible threats against a planned rally.

For almost three decades, these paramilitaries (thought to be in the hundreds across the country) have viewed the government as the adversary. With a friend residing in the White House, however, these groups experienced an identity crisis. This need for an enemy explains the shift into targeting immigrants and religious minorities. It wasn't just to please their man. It was to embrace a cause allowing them to grow.

After Trump won, there was an increase in the number of paramilitary groups, but the GOP has been no stranger to them. In 2017, a local chapter of the Republican Party in Oregon passed a resolution allowing paramilitaries (the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, for instance) to provide security at the local party events. These groups are part of the Patriot Movement, a loose far-right network affiliated with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and armed confrontations in Nevada and Oregon in 2016.

The Republican Party seems to be very comfortable with these groups around, as we have seen in Nevada, Oregon, Michigan, and other states. However, this is not a recent venture, since the accounts of strengthening ties can be traced back even before Trump won the election in 2016. The openness about their common interests is perhaps new, but it's not surprising. Alarms were sounded when state Senate Majority Leader, Republican Mike Shirkey of Michigan, participated in a rally organized by paramilitaries that stormed the Michigan Capitol back in April 2020 alongside a member of a group involved in the planned kidnapping of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Though Michigan has a history of paramilitaries, the state GOP had tied itself to them, especially since the election as party co-chair of Meshawn Maddock. She organized a protest to interrupt ballot counting in Detroit, where paramilitaries were present.

Johnson's statement is outrageous, not only for the racism, but also for the approval of white armed groups as opposed to unarmed groups as well as the acknowledgement that he didn't feel threatened by them since they were exercising their freedom. Compare that to his comments about BLM and Antifa, but that's another discussion.

The connections the Republican Party has with paramilitaries are not ambiguous, yet the ongoing investigation into the Capitol attack will likely provide more evidence of the extremely disturbing behavior of the formerly conservative party. Ties between not only Trump and his associates, like Roger Stone, whose security detail included members of the Oath Keepers, but the GOP at state and local levels, should bring into the discussion how one of the major parties in the country is going to stand for democracy while leading a double-life with paramilitaries bent on racial supremacy.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/extremist/

theconv

after President Joe Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021 without any violent incidents, many in the United States and worldwide breathed a sigh of relief.

The respite may be brief. The ingredients that led an incensed pro-Trump mob to break into the Capitol and plant pipe bombs at other federal buildings on Jan. 6 remain.

Several U.S. security experts say they now consider domestic extremism a greater threat to the country than international terror. According to my research on political violence, the U.S. has all the elements that, combined, can produce a low-intensity terrorist conflict: extreme polarization and armed factions willing to break the law, in a wealthy democracy with a strong government.

Terror can thrive in affluent democracies too

Chronic domestic terror is not the same as civil war.

In the modern era, civil wars usually take place in poor countries where the government is too weak and unstable to maintain control over a sprawling, often mountainous territory. Rebels take over swaths of the country and seek to replace the authorities in those areas. This is happening in Afghanistan, India and Nigeria, to name a few places.

In the United States, one of the world's more powerful nations, armed factions have a hard time permanently seizing land. Several dramatic standoffs between fringe extremists and American authorities – including the 1993 Waco siege and the Bundy family's 41-day occupation of an Oregon wildlife refuge in 2016 – ended poorly for the extremists.

A huge asymmetry of power between the state and armed factions prevents militants from openly battling to usurp its authority, as rebel groups like the Taliban do and the American Confederates did. It forces armed groups to act underground, hiding among the general population. Because democratic states cannot, at least on paper, openly violate human rights by systematically persecuting militants or torturing prisoners...It limits the number of operations they can sustain, meaning thinner ranks than full-fledged insurgencies and fewer overall fatalities than in civil wars. And although all rebels may dream of...Che Guevara-style guerrilla adventures – heroically liberating "the people" from tyranny – in practice, militants working underground cannot avoid resorting to quintessential terrorist tactics such as bombs, shootings, bank robberies and kidnappings....Red Brigades, for example. In the 1970s, this far-left organization aimed at overthrowing the capitalist system, but the Italian state was too strong. So the group resorted to terrorism. For two decades, the Red Brigades carried out a low-intensity campaign that killed perhaps 500 people, mainly with bombings and assassinations. They used violence .

In reaction to this communist violence, far-right groups like Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari responded with indiscriminate attacks, including a no-warning 1980 train bombing in Bologna that killed 85 civilians. They sought to create a level of disruption so high that it would...justify military intervention against the "enemies of the state" – a fascist coup d'etat.

Both sides lost. There was no insurrection, no intervention. Italian democracy prevailed.

Lone wolf terror

The U.S, too, has experience with coordinated domestic terror.

Throughout the early 20th century, the Ku Klux Klan waged vicious campaigns against Black Americans in the South. As the ebbed in the late 1960s, radical Marxists like the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army emerged, using violence to oppose American military intervention in Vietnam and push for racial equality.

Between 1969 and 1981, these two groups – one predominately white, the other Black – conducted some 200 attacks, from bank robberies to prison breaks. Fifteen people were killed, most of them security officers.

The FBI engaged in heavy-handed repression, particularly against Black militants. And Americans had scant interest in far left-wing goals like helping the oppressed peoples of the world. Both groups dwindled without much fanfare.

U.S. history has also featured a smattering of fringe, lone wolf terrorists, from the Unabomber on the left to the Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph on the right. This trend has recently accelerated, with a deadly new massacre each year. Individual white supremacists, in particular, have attacked immigrants and people of color, in Charleston, South Carolina, El Paso, Texas and beyond.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks hate crimes, 2019 was one of the deadliest years for "domestic extremist-related killings" since 1970, with 42 victims in 17 separate incidents.

Trump's militias

Attacks characterized by lone wolf perpetrators have the advantage of limiting legal scrutiny on the extremist milieu. But with coordination, armed campaigns can scale up to do much more damage.

To overcome the lone wolf stage, disparate militant groups must organize around a common theme that gives coherence to their violence. Trump's electoral defeat gave his : the myth of a stolen election.

The Trump presidency emboldened a...cabal of armed groups with a far-right agenda. Seeing their leader out of power will only grow this feeling of frustration. So will new repression of the far right, in the form of and social media clampdowns.

With Democrats controlling Washington and elections perceived as rigged, American far-right groups may believe further violence is the only way to counter what they see as federal overreach.<...history shows their chances of succeeding are negligible. But this won't stop them from trying.

Luis De la Calle, Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and Associate Professor in Political Science, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/oath-keeper/

raw story

Federal prosecutors on Friday made shocking allegations against Donovan Ray Crowl, a former U.S. Marine and member of the right-wing paramilitary group the "Oath Keepers" who was arrested for being part of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

"Crowl, 50, is one of three members of the right-wing group who've been charged with conspiring to disrupt the congressional session to certify President-elect Joe Biden's electoral victory. Thomas Edward Caldwell, 65, an apparent leader of the Oath Keepers, and Jessica Watkins, a 38-year-old Army veteran, have also been charged with conspiracy. All three have since been ordered held without bail," The Daily Beast reported Friday.

The Beast quoted a Virginia prosecutor's comments during Crowl's detention hearing.

"The plan was never for peaceful protest," the prosecutor said. "The Oath Keepers arrived in D.C. prepared for violence."

"[Crowl's] been preparing for literal war because that's what his organization told him to do," the prosecutor argued.

The DOJ affidavit in support of the criminal complaint and arrest warrant against Crowl includes multiple pictures from the riots that prosecutors allege show Crowl. One of the photos included was actually posted by a "self-proclaimed commanding officer of the Ohio State Regular Militia. An interview Crowl gave to The New Yorker was also cited[big pix doc]

affidavit in support of criminal complaint and arrest warrant in the case of United States vs. Donovan Ray Crowl. Screengrab.

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proud boys 3 oathkeepers charges?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/capitol-invasion/

no lnx

the more the media and law enforcement officials discuss the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol Building, the more disturbing the details become. Journalists Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein address the events of Jan. 6 in an article published by Politico this week, reporting that according to federal investigators, evidence is suggesting that some of the insurrectionists were making detailed and complex plans in advance of the attack on the Capitol Building.

Cheney and Gerstein explain, "A new affidavit filed Tuesday by the FBI described preparations by the right-wing Proud Boys to storm the Capitol, including using earpieces and walkie-talkies to direct movements throughout the building and a discussion about wearing black to dupe people into blaming Antifa for any trouble."

And according to the Politico reporters, a "separate criminal filing released Wednesday afternoon…. described leaders among the rioters issuing marching orders to more effectively fight police."

An affidavit from a deputy U.S. marshal, they note, reads, "Unidentified rioters are heard instructing the front line of rioters to make a 'shield wall' to prevent law enforcement from controlling rioters with oleoresin capsicum spray."

Cheney and Gerstein quote Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin Gianforti as saying of the Jan. 6 attack, "Mob is not the right term, because there's a level of organization here that bears noting. The rioters are swapping in people here who are fresh. They're passing weaponry to the front of the scrum to use against officers."

According to Cheney and Gerstein, "The new court filings were the latest indications that the Jan. 6 riots included cells of organized, militarized insurrectionists, beyond the rabble of disorganized Trump supporters who joined the fray. That evidence includes the conspiracy case filed this week against three so-called Oath Keepers, members of an Ohio-based chapter of the loosely connected paramilitary group, who face charges of seeking to injure police officers,obstruct Congress and damage federal property."d paramilitary group, who face charges of seeking to injure police officers, obstruct Congress and damage federal property."

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making up for not pulling trigger on insurr?

https://www.mediamatters.org/oath-keepers/oath-keepers-leader-stewart-rhodes-calls-militia-members-prepare-violence-against

qanon said infiltrate inaug w/ nat g uniforms; FBI has to do bkgd checks to stop insider attack, 2 guys booted

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/capitol-riot-2650025524

U.S. authorities have arrested the leader of an extremist group on a conspiracy charge for storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in an effort to interfere with the certification of the electoral college vote.

According to The Washington Post, alleged "Oath Keeper" Thomas Edward Caldwell of Clarke County, Va., was arrested on Tuesday, Jan. 19, and is now facing four federal charges including "conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States in the attack on the Capitol. The conspiracy charge is reserved for offenses interfering with or obstructing the lawful operation of government."

Law enforcement officials' affidavit notes that Caldwell was reportedly responsible for organizing a group of 8 to 10 individuals, including some who have been identified as "styled Ohio militia members" who "wore helmets and military-style gear and were seen moving purposefully toward the top of the Capitol steps and leading the move against police lines." The Ohio members of the group were reportedly arrested on Sunday, Jan. 17. [DUNNO IF GRAB BUDDY COLLAR MEANS ANYTHING]

The affidavit also references a message Caldwell shared on Facebook on Jan. 1, just days before the pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol. In that message, Caldwell noted that he had looked into travel accommodations for a group of individuals. One hotel location, in particular, was located in Ballston, Va., just 8 miles away from the U.S. Capitol. Caldwell reportedly highlighted that location because it "would allow us to go hunting at night if we wanted to."

That message was sent to a woman named Jessica Watkins. The 38-year-old U.S. Army veteranwas among the Ohio residents arrested on Sunday, Jan.17 for storming the Capitol along with other members of the "Ohio State Regular Militia," an extremist group she allegedly founded back in 2019.

The FBI also highlighted another message Caldwell sent suggesting they would be mobilizing since Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes had not made his "call to arms."

"I don't know if Stewie has even gotten out his call to arms, but it's a little friggin late," Caldwell wrote on Jan. 1, adding, "This is one we are doing on our own. We will link up with the North Carolina [sic] crew."

The affidavit also reveals that Caldwell also sent a video message from inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. Accompanying the disturbing clip, he wrote, "us storming the castle. Please share. Sharon was right with me! I am such an instigator! She was ready for it man! Didn't even mind the tear gas."

"Proud boys scuffled with cops and drove them inside to hide. Breached the doors. One guy made it all the way to the house floor, another to Pelosi's office. A good time," Caldwell said. Shortly after making that remark, Caldwell added, "We need to do this at the local level. Lets [sic] storm the capitol in Ohio. Tell me when!"

As of Tuesday, Jan. 19, more than 100 people have been arrested in connection with the riot that took place on Capitol Hill.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/michigan-election/

hunter kos

the *Detroit Free Press* reports that the Michigan House and Senate buildings will be closed both to staffers and the public on Monday as the state's electors to the Electoral College meet to cast their votes for the state's presidential winner, Joe Biden. The Capitol was already expected to be closed to the public during the Electoral College meeting; this new, expanded closure also includes the building's legislative staff.

While neither Michigan State Police nor a spokesperson for the House Speaker's office would explain the reason for the closure, other than it being due to "security concerns," :{State Rep. Kevin Hertel tweeted that it was due to ":(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{credible threats":(style="background-color:#ffff00;"):}: that "have been made as Michigan's electors" meet.

The state has been a hotspot of fascist militia activity. Michigan legislators has been the subject of armed protests by the far right and the Michigan governor, a Democrat, was the intended victim of a domestic terrorism plot in which members of a far-right group sought to kidnap and possibly execute her over the state's pandemic safety measures.

Only a week ago, armed rightwing protesters with the intellect of flatworms demonstrated at the house of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson over rabid Republican conspiracy theories claiming Joe Biden's win over Donald Trump was fraudulent and/or a conspiracy.

There is no word on what security measures are in place as a response to the apparent "credible" threats aimed at disrupting the electors' official vote. Michigan state Republicans, however, have repeatedly encouraged the state's violent conspiracy theorists, most recently by inviting Trump "lawyers" Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis to present their election conspiracy claims to the Republican-led House.

an 1220

texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the election results in four states that President-elect Joe Biden won: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin. Michigan's Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, slammed Paxton for his frivolous lawsuitduring a December 9 appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" — stressing that Paxton's "publicity stunt" is showing a deep contempt for democracy. She also compared the barrage of GOP election lawsuits to the character Jason, a hockey mask-wearing serial killer in the "Friday the 13th" series of horror movies.

"This post-election process has been like a 'Friday the 13th moment," Nessel told "Morning Joe" host Mika Brzezinski. "No matter how many times you shoot Jason or you stab Jason or you electrocute Jason, he just keeps on coming back at you over and over again — and he just won't stay down…. The claims (in these lawsuits) have been debunked time and time again, but it continues to erode people's faith and confidence in our electoral system. And that's the real lasting and damaging element of this, unfortunately."

Nessel noted that numerous GOP election lawsuits have been rejected or thrown out in the courts, including a Pennsylvania-related lawsuit that the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to even consider. Republican supporters of President Donald Trump have filed one lawsuit after another attacking the election results and claiming, without evidence, that Trump was the victim of widespread voter fraud. Paxton, in his lawsuit, alleges widespread voter fraud in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin but offers no proof of it.

"Everything about this lawsuit is egregious and disturbing," Nessel told Brzezinski. "But we have to take it seriously from the perspective of….. the lasting damage it is doing to our democracy."

According to Nessel, "The Texas AG seeks to overturn the will of the voters in four other states that he certainly does not represent. But he is essentially asking that the slate of electors for Biden in all four of these states — where, of course, the election has already been certified — be instead overturned, and that a slate of electors be chosen by the Republican legislatures to reflect a Trump win in all four states where we know very well that Biden won. And in my state, it was by over 150,000 votes. The vote was not even close."

On "Morning Joe," Nessel also discussed a frightening incident in which armed Trump supporters recently surrounded the home of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and shouted what Benson described as "baseless conspiracy theories about the election." Like Nessel, Benson is part of the Democratic administration of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who was recently the target of a kidnapping plot by far-right white nationalists and militia members.

Grateful to state & local law enforcement who are working to protect my family, but by far the biggest thanks of al… https://t.co/IEoDM88nCg

— Jocelyn Benson (@Jocelyn Benson)1607304127.0

Nessel told Brzezinski, "This could all end tomorrow if Donald Trump would do the decent thing and concede the election…. Instead, he continues to cling to their false (accusation) that he was somehow cheated out of this election."

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-texas

Some supporters of President Donald Trump in Texas say they're willing to take up arms against the American government the minute that Trump gives them the order.

In an interview with *Reuters*, Texas-based chiropractor Brett Fryar says he has joined a militia group called the South Plains Patriots who are conducting firearms training sessions in case they need to stage an armed revolt against the American government.

"If President Trump comes out and says: 'Guys, I have irrefutable proof of fraud, the courts won't listen, and I'm now calling on Americans to take up arms,' we would go," he explained.

In total, Reuters interviewed 50 different Trump supporters across the country and found that all of them believe that President-elect Joe Biden had stolen the election from Trump.

What's more, only 20 expressed a willingness to accept that Biden had won, but only if presented with evidence that no fraud had occurred.

Janet Hedrick, a 70-year-old Trump supporter from West Virginia, told Reuters that she believes all of the president's debunked conspiracy theories about the election being stolen.

“There's millions and millions of Trump votes that were just thrown out," she said. “That computer was throwing them out."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/right-wing-politics/

amanda

the far right had a dream: That one day, people who had been exiled to the unacceptable margins of American political life could play the role of Donald Trump's brownshirts.

In the weeks leading up to the election, excitement was rising among those Americans who convinced themselves that Trump would be the glorious leader in a national purge of their perceived enemies. QAnon fans buzzed with excitement that "the storm" — their term for their belief that the entire Democratic establishment, as well as many popular celebrities, would be rounded up into prison camps — was coming soon. The Proud Boys, a neofascist group that claim to defend "Western civilization," were also riled up after Trump told them to "stand by" during a presidential debate in September. The menagerie of white supremacists and militia groups were stepping up recruitment efforts, stoked about what they believed would soon be the eruption of a new civil war.

Then came the election. Trump lost. This has been very difficult for those people to accept.

People with fanatical and delusional beliefs famously don't give them up just because they've been hit over the head with reality, of course. The various subcultures of crackpots that have sprung up under Trump are no exception.

Still, the election results have sent these groups reeling. All of them have spent the past four years growing their ranks and orbiting around Trump, convinced that he was a savior figure who would crush their perceived enemies.

For believers in QAnon, that belief manifested in a fantasy that Trump was going to round up all the members of the "deep state," their imaginary shadowy conspiracy of Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and progressive activists that they believe both secretly runs the world and is also a network of Satan-worshipping cannibal pedophiles. Trump, they told themselves, was secretly organizing "the storm" to round up and destroy this sinister global conspiracy.

But since Trump's election, Q — a user account that started on 8chan and drifted over to 8kun after 8chan was disbanded — has fallen silent. QAnon faithful believe the account is run by a current or former U.S. intelligence agent and Trump loyalist. In fact, it's probably run by the father-and-son duo Jim and Ron Watkins, who are conspiracy theorists and definitely not U.S. intelligence agents. Without Q's guidance, the QAnon cult appears to be confused and angry.

"They were not expecting him to lose, and they were not expecting Fox News to call it," Fredrick Brennan, the founder of 8chan — who has spent the past few months giving interviews accusing the Watkinses of running Q's account — told the New York Times. "It was really psychologically damaging."

Q believers haven't given up the faith yet, of course. But without guidance from its leader, the QAnon community is adrift and very likely to fracture into competing and antagonistic splinter sects, as is common in these kinds of communities.

Witness, for instance, what's happening to the Proud Boys, which started off largely as a male chauvinist group but has morphed into what looks very much like a neofascist organization that purports to defend "Western civilization." The Proud Boys had their proudest moment in September, when Trump refused to denounce them during a debate and instead told them to "stand down and stand by," clearly implying that they should be at the ready to defend his grip on the White House if he felt it was under threat.

But even though Trump is half-heartedly still trying to steal the election, he has so far disappointed the Proud Boys by not calling on them to commit violence against his enemies in a glorious coup. (Mostly, Trump is hiding from public view, tweeting out articles from fringe right-wing sites and playing golf.) So, as often happens with marginal subcultures full of deeply unpleasant people, the Proud Boys are breaking apart, torn asunder by infighting.

At heart is a fight between two figureheads, Kyle Chapman and Enrique Tarrio, over whether the Proud Boys should stick by their dubious claim that there is nothing racist about the ideology of "Western chauvinism," or should openly embrace white nationalism and anti-Semitism.Chapman is representing the blatant-racism side, declaring himself the new president of the splinter group calling themselves, no kidding, the "Proud Goys." Tarrio is insisting that Chapman is a flunkey, failing to understand that the same can be said of anyone associated with the Proud Boys.

Other right wing militia and white nationalist groups, such as the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers, spent the weeks before the election firing themselves up for what they believed was an upcoming civil war. Now that Trump's presidency is deflating like a day-after birthday balloon, they're not quite ready to give up the fantasy. https://www.mediamatters.org/infowars/militia-leader-stewart-rhodes-says-he-has-men-stationed-outside-dc-ready-engage-violence

On Wednesday, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, appeared on Infowars with Alex Jones and promised the faithful that the violence against hated liberals is still coming.

"We have men already stationed outside D.C. as a nuclear option in case they attempt to remove the president illegally, we will step in and stop it," Rhodes declared, swearing that his forces are armed and "prepared to go in, if the president calls us up."

As with most of the threats made by far-right figures, this is both a fantasy and a dangerous one. It's just plain silly to imagine that a handful of middle-aged and badly organized conspiracy theorists, no matter how many guns they have, could manage the task of seizing the federal government in a paramilitary coup.

It's dangerous, of course, because these people do have guns. Unfortunately, as we've seen with mass shootings like those in El Paso and Pittsburgh, the car attacks on Black Lives Matter protesters, and the shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, men who have been radicalized by such talk are fully capable of acts of domestic terrorism against civilians.

On Saturday, these various groups of extremists are planning to descend on Washington for a demonstration in support ofTrump's fading effort to steal the election, which they of course spin as preventing Democrats from stealing the election. (As always with right-wingers, everything is projection.) As usual, far-right figures are over-hyping their efforts, calling the supposed rally the "Million MAGA March" or the "March for Trump."

In reality, almost none of the groups who claim they plan to show up have even applied for a permit, suggesting that they know what's likely to happen: An underwhelming display by a handful of loudmouths with angry signs, whose demands are incoherent and who have no plan of action to achieve their goals anyway.

As I witnessed in Philadelphia, even when the far right had a solid target and goal — stopping election officials from counting ballots — they could barely muster up a handful of people. The ones who showed up were easily run off by a group of leftists armed with cardboard signs and a boombox.Washington, D.C., doesn't permit the open carry of weapons, taking away yet another incentive to show up for the deeply insecure men of this movement.There's nothing they can do to save Donald Trump. All they have left is impotent flailing.

None of which is to say that we can just wash our hands of the far right and never think about them again. Far from it: The right-wing fringe has been enormously successful in recruiting conservatives to their way of thinking. Surveys suggest that more than 80% of Trump voters believe Joe Biden's victory was illegitimate, and about half of all Republican voters buy into the QAnon conspiracy theories to some degree. What were once whacked-out "far-right" beliefs are now just mainstream conservatism.

The difference between the fringe and the mainstream of the Republican Party now is less about belief and more about a willingness to take action. That fringe — the ones who've actually joined far-right groups and may actually show up at Saturday's "rally" — is scrambling now. But such people never really go away. They'll find some other cause to latch onto, some other justification for their fascist impulses. Some, unfortunately, will continue to seek violence or even to commit acts of terrorism.

But for now, Trump's defeat is a mighty blow to the far right. Their dreams of crushing the people they view as "the left" and of "reclaiming" the culture of America were always ludicrous, no matter how much tear gas Trump sprayed at Black Lives Matter demonstrators. But now, with Trump on his way to Palm Beach exile, they've lost their lodestar. The process of fracture and dispersal for these self-appointed warriors of the right has begun. We must hope they don't find another figurehead to rally around anytime soon.

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mma1120

Oath Keepers militia, which is comprised of “former law enforcement officials and military veterans,” is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of the largest radical anti-government groups in the U.S. today.” This week, Oath Keepers militia leader Steward Rhodes told conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that members of his militia will be at polling locations on Election Day to “protect” Trump voters.

Rhodes went on to make many other unhinged statements on the program, including that the militia would follow directives from President Donald Trump to take members of the “deep state” into custody and “do what we have to do,” and that Oath Keepers will “be in range” of Washington D.C., to stop a “Benghazi-style” attack on the White House on election night, among other statements. Rhodes also hyped the possibility of a second civil war where his “battle-hardened” supporters kill the “street soldiers” and “command and control” of “the radical left.”

Media Matters’ Timothy Johnson explained the danger Rhodes and other militia members could pose: “Ahead of Election Day, there is mounting concern that firearms will be brought to voting locations and used to intimidate voters. On October 27, a Republican-appointed Michigan judge struck down a directive that prohibited firearms from being openly carried at polling sites in that state after several pro-gun groups filed a lawsuit. Just six states and Washington, D.C., have total bans of firearms at voting locations.”

Also: Media Matters president Angelo Carusone spoke to Politicoabout how militias are organizing around right-wing predictions of left-wing violence: "There is a high possibility, researchers have noted, that militia posturing around the election will not result in actual demonstrations or violence. But as long as conservative rhetoric focuses on playing up left-wing violence, warned Media Matters’ Carusone, it will help perpetuate militia culture. 'Hyping warnings about potential left-wing violence is significant because that's what we're seeing militia groups planning around,' he said. 'We are seeing a similar theme in militia/extremist activity — that they're hyper focused on potential for left-wing groups to become violent on or after the election.'"

mma1120

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/fears-of-violence-and-voter-intimidation-grow-as-election-day-draws-closer-reports/

alex h

the 2020 presidential election will go down in history as one that was even more volatile than the 1968 election, and many Americans have been expressing fears that violence and voter intimidation will occur on Election Day. That fear is addressed in new articles by the Washington Post, Time and USA Today.

Journalist Mark Berman, in the Post, reports that law enforcement are preparing for the worst.

"Tens of millions of Americans have cast ballots at early-voting sites, and tensions and accusations of voter intimidation have already flared up during this process," Berman explains. "Many Americans still plan to turn out on Election Day; so, law enforcement officials have conducted drills involving multiple agencies to try to game out what could happen. Police officials in multiple cities stressed that they have no information about specific threats relating to the election, but are instead preparing to make sure they are ready."

Andrew Walsh, a deputy chief for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, told the Post, "I don't think we've seen anything like this in modern times…. When you look at previous elections, there's always been the concern when you have large crowds…. We know (that) can be a target for someone who has an agenda."

David Brown, a superintendent for the Chicago Police Department, told the Post, "We are all in conversations with our counterparts across the country about what we might expect. But everything is uncertain, and so, we're trying as best we can to anticipate any hazard that might happen." And Washington D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham noted, "It is widely believed that there will be civil unrest after the November election regardless of who wins."

Reporter Melissa Chan, in Time, reports that police departments around the U.S. expect to be on high alert on Election Day.

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based think tank the Police Executive Research Forum, told Time, "It's fair to say the police are preparing in ways they never would have had to for Election Day. This year is unlike any other year."

According to Chan, "The presence of militia groups at polls could pose real safety concerns in light of a new Amnesty International report that said U.S. law enforcement failed to protect peaceful protesters from violent attacks by armed vigilante groups and counterprotesters in nearly 200 cases from May to September.The report, released Friday, said law enforcement often neglected to deploy an adequate amount of trained officers, separate or deescalate tensions between opposing groups and often harmed peaceful protesters while dealing with violent ones."

In USA Today, journalistTrevor Hughes addresses fears that far-right extremists will resort to acts of voter intimidation on Election Day — and that Black voters will be among their targets.

The NAACP's Stephanie Owens told USA Today, "The symbolism of who you're supporting is a very large component of our election tradition, but there is almost nothing traditional about this election. People are already being targeted based on the candidates they are supporting."

The Rev. Carl Day, a Philadelphia-based pastor and liberal/progressive activist, has been warning the Black community that they could be targeted for voter intimidation. Day told USA Today, "When the president of the United States seems like he's inciting a demographic of people to be on standby and he's saying he might not leave office, it brings legitimate fears to people. It's in a lot of conversations in a lot of rooms I'm in."

Carolyn Gallaher, a professor at American University's School of International Service in Washington, D.C., told USA Today, "Everyone I know is concerned both about voter intimidation at the polls and potential violence as we get results from the election — and sort of what that might look like not just around the election, but between the election and the inauguration."

Gallagher fears that the far right will resort to violence whether Trump wins reelection or is defeated by former Vice President Joe Biden. The American University professor told USA Today, "The violence will occur either way. If Biden wins, it will be an excuse to try to delegitimize the results and to go after perceived enemies on the left — and of course, that means labeling pretty much anyone that you disagree with Antifa. But I worry, too, if Trump wins, this will be a signal to these far-right groups that have supported him — extremist groups like the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, other groups like this — that they will see this is like open season to go after people that have been opponents of Trump."

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/rick-joyner-assures-his-viewers-its-gonna-be-pretty-much-business-as-usual-during-the-coming-civil-war/

no vid

right-wing pastor Rick Joynerposted a video on his Facebook page Friday in which he told viewers not to worry about the looming civil war that is supposedly coming to the United States because even though there will be violence and bloodshed, it’ll mostly be confined to the inner cities, and life will be “pretty much business as usual” for everyone else.

Joyner, who has been warning for years that the United States is heading for civil war and martial law and recently declared that God had “seeded our country” with military veterans who are experienced with urban warfare to head up “good militias,” assured his viewers that they would most likely be minimally impacted by the coming conflagration.

“Everyone, when they hear civil war, they think, ‘Oh no, every city, community, everybody’s gonna be in battles,'” Joyner. “Think about it: Only a tiny percentage of the population of America was engaged in the first Civil War. Really it was 1 or 2 percent of the actual population of the country were engaged in battles in the Civil War. The rest of the country went on with business as usual.”

“Now, I believe this one is going to be of a different nature,” he continued. “It’s not gonna be pitched battles with armies. I believe it is going to be inner cities. I believe it’s gonna be a lot of militias engaged. I believe it’s going to be difficult, no doubt about it, but it’s going to be different. But still, in most of the country, it’s gonna be pretty much business as usual.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/michigan-republicans-struggle-with-recognition-of-their-own-roles-in-fueling-militia-kidnap-plot

david n kos

discovering that terrorists can look like the guys next door is a jarring thing, especially if that's not how you've been conditioned to think of such matters. In Michigan this week, cognitive dissonance has been thick on the ground—especially as public officials who came too close to the plotters and their incendiary rhetoric have tried to wrestle with the consequences of last week's arrests of 13 Michigan militiamen who schemed to kidnap and assassinate Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

A local sheriff who had appeared onstage at an anti-Whitmer rally this spring suggested to a TV interviewer that maybe the plotters—some of whom he knows personally—were just trying to make a citizens arrest. A Republican state legislative candidate opined that the arrests were "a totally bogus sham." And the state's Republican Speaker of the House, who has helped stoke the incendiary "tyranny" rhetoric that fueled the plotters, chastised Whitmer for pointing out the connection between the plotters' actions and the rhetoric used by Donald Trump and Michigan Republicans. [vid rally w. da bois and dar]

Dar Leaf, the sheriff of Barry County—where two of the accused domestic terrorists, William and Michael Null, reside and were arrested by the FBI Thursday—told a Grand Rapids interviewer that he believed the men might have been within their rights.

"It's just a charge, and they say a 'plot to kidnap' and you got to remember that. Are they trying to kidnap? Because a lot of people are angry with the governor, and they want her arrested. So are they trying to arrest or was it a kidnap attempt? Because you can still in Michigan if it's a felony, make a felony arrest," Leaf told Fox17 reporter Aaron Parshegian.

He added: "The two gentlemen that I know of from my county, were they involved in that? I don't know. They're innocent till proven guilty. And we really, really should be careful, trying to try them in the media."

The evidence unveiled by the FBI included multiple instances of surveillance of Whitmer's summer home, where the militiamen—who called themselves the Wolverine Watchmen—planned to abduct her, as well as multiple instances in which the men discussed killing her. The evidence also showed that not only had the men originally planned a paramilitary assault on the state Capitol, they also made plans to kill law-enforcement officers. The discussion of a "citizens arrest" of Whitmer was largely rhetorical.

Leaf's comments created an uproar. Shortly after the interview aired, Michigan's attorney general, Dana Nessel, ripped into him on Twitter:

As Michigan's top law enforcement official, let me make this abundantly clear-Persons who are not sworn, licensed members of a law enforcement agency cannot and should not "arrest" government offficials with whom they have disagreements. These comments are dangerous.

Leaf tried to defend the remarks subsequently by insisting that he only wanted to ensure that men weren't being "tried in the media."

"I don't want anybody to think I'm sympathetic towards these charges, right, these are very, very serious charges," he said. "What I don't want is I don't want us to be trying it in the media and we mess it up in the justice system somewhere, 'cause they can't get a fair trial."

Leaf told MLive: "The governor has the right to govern and also the right to be safe." Yet he went on to criticize officials like Whitmer and Nessel for blaming people like Trump and himself for creating an atmosphere empowering fringe groups.Leaf said the militia movement "has been brewing for quite some time" over what he described as "a gradual and growing loss of rights."

In fact, as Jen Hayden explored earlier, Leaf is a member of a law-enforcement organization closely aligned with the "Patriot" militia movement with which the plotters identified. He also was an outspoken critic of Whitmer's anti-COVID-19 pandemic orders.

At a May 18 "Michigan Patriots Rally" held at Rosa Parks Circle in Grand Rapids, Leaf had appeared onstage with several militiamen, including Michael Null. In his speech, he compared Whitmer's stay-at-home orders to being held unlawfully under house arrest. Leaf had also described Owosso barber Karl Manke—who had defied the governor's order by opening his shop—a "little version of Rosa Parks."

Meanwhile, Republican legislative candidate Paul Smith of Sterling Heights angrily denounced the arrests on Twitter.

"What a totally bogus sham," Smith commented. "These citizens never did anything illegal. Law enforcement is employed to punish people who COMMIT crimes, not people The Governess simply HATES. You can legally hurt Whitmer by voting out her minions."

State Republican leaders were appalled, and announced they had withdrawn financial and other support for Smith's candidacy, calling the remarks "conspiracy theories and hateful remarks."

"If you can't denounce the evil plans and actions of these white nationalists, we don't want you in our caucus," Republican House Speaker Lee Chatfield said. "In fact, if there's any 'Republican' who thinks like this guy, we don't want your vote either. We don't support domestic terrorism."

Chatfield, however, also chastised Whitmer for her remarks laying some of the blame at Trump's feet that week: "Just last week, the president of the United States stood before the American people and refused to condemn white supremacists and hate groups like these two Michigan militia groups," Whitmer said, adding that extremists had "heard the president's words not as a rebuke but as a rallying cry—as a call to action."

In a Twitter thread, Chatfield criticized Whitmer, claiming she had kept the investigation under wraps: "Why weren't we warned of the plot to take hostages at the Capitol? The plot by these terrorists was against us too. Why weren't House sergeants warned? You knew and we weren't even given a warning. We had people working in the building and their lives matter too." However, it was the FBI, and not Whitmer, who had overseen the sharing of information with potential victims.

Chatfield also suggested that she shared in the blame: "Hatred and violence are wrong, and that's why I've continually denounced it," he wrote. "And I agree, it's time to tone the partisan rhetoric and 'the heat down.' Will you do the same for President Trump? Will the [lieutenant governor] do it to the entire GOP? We have to make this decision together."

However, Chatfield and other leading Michigan Republicans, had played their own not-insignificant roles in whipping up anti-Whitmer hysteria, as Michigan journalist Joshua Pugh pointed out on Twitter. When "Patriot" protesters had locked down Lansing with an anti-Whitmer protest on April 15 that featured Confederate flags and incendiary rhetoric, Chatfield had greeted them by waving a flag out his window and tweeting out encouragement.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey had been even more incendiary. On the floor of the Senate during a subsequent Lansing protest—during which armed militia members were watching from the gallery above—Shirkey had called the governor a tyrant: "If she does not recognize the end of the emergency declaration, we have no other choice but to act," he said, not clarifying what kind of action he intended.

After Thursday's arrests, Shirkey was defiant: "This is no time to be weak in our commitment to freedom," Shirkey told a "Let MI People Go" rally at the Capitol. "We need to be strong…and not be afraid of those who are taking our freedoms away from us."

Shirkey also told the crowd at Thursday's rally that they were not the same people involved in the plot to kill the governor. However, the *Detroit Free Press*identified several of the arrestees as participants at the earlier protests against Whitmer's orders.

In Barry County, Leaf's remarks sparked calls for his resignation. Local residents organized a protest demanding he step down or face a recall movement—but that protest was called off when organizers became concerned about the safety of participants amid the likelihood of armed right-wing counter-protesters.

"Whereas I truly believe in the statement we were trying to make, I cannot in good conscience compromise the safety of my fellow Barry County residents," organizer Olivia Bennett wrote on the event's Facebook page.

"I have come to this conclusion for a couple reasons. First, there were many concerns about confrontational counter protesters. Second, this protest garnered enough attention this weekend that crowd size was a concern given short notice, security, and capacity at the commissioners' meeting."

Bennett tried to clarify that she and other protesters aren't suggesting the sheriff was a participant. "We are not accusing him of having known about the kidnapping plot and we are not accusing him of being a part of it at all," Bennett told MLive. "What I am suggesting is his actions and his words embolden people who would attempt to do such things."

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/experts-warn-of-danger-posed-by-armed-pro-trump-poll-watchers/

no lnx

Experts warn of danger posed by armed pro-Trump poll watchers

Kenny Stancil October 11, 2020

Following President Donald Trump's refusal last month to denounce white supremacists along with his longstanding pattern of undermining democratic norms—and in the wake of the FBI's interception of a plot by right-wing domestic terrorists to kidnap Michigan's Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and overthrow the state government—fears are mounting about the danger posed by far-right paramilitary groups heeding Trump's call to "go into the polls and watch very carefully."

Two weeks after Donald Trump Jr. took to social media in an attempt to recruit an "army for Trump's election security," and with early voting already underway, Republicans this week have begun dispatching thousands of volunteers to in-person voting locations and mail-in ballot drop boxes, part of a desperate "effort to find evidence to back up Trump's unsubstantiated complaints about widespread voter fraud," Reuters reported Thursday.

According to more than 20 officials involved in the effort, "the mission... is to capture photos and videos Republicans can use to support so-far unfounded claims that mail voting is riddled with chicanery, and to help their case if legal disputes erupt over the results of... the contest between Republican incumbent Trump and his Democratic opponent Joe Biden."

But critics of the Trump campaign's operation—which revolves around baseless presumptions of fraudulent electoral activity committed by supporters of Democratic candidates—argued that the president's "call for his supporters to serve as self-appointed" poll-watchers "sounded more like an incitement to voter intimidation and violence than an endorsement of the role election observers play in protecting democratic norms."

Given the White House's alarming normalization of violence against political foes, voting rights experts, civic officials, and citizens are increasingly concerned about the negative consequences that could ensue if tensions escalate and the president's most militant supporters—white nationalist gangs, so-called "patriots" donning Confederate and Nazi regalia, and other heavily armed pro-Trump factions—follow his authoritarian cues.

Steven Gardiner, a scholar at the progressive think tankPolitical Research Associates, told The Guardian on Friday that "the militias will absolutely seize on" Trump's comments.

"The possibility of armed factions with military-style rifles showing up at polling places is very troubling," Gardiner added.

When Devin Burghart—director of the anti-hate organization theInstitute for Research and Education on Human Rights—heard Trump endorse voter intimidation at last month's debate, his "first thought was, 'Here we go.'"

"This is the stuff of our worst nightmares," Burghart said.

As Common Dreams reported on Thursday amid the revelation that 13 suspects had been arrested on kidnapping and terrorism charges after law enforcement officials foiled a right-wing plot to attack the Michigan State Capitol and hold Gov. Whitmer hostage, many observers have made connections between Trump's demagogic rhetoric and his followers' violent actions.

"I wonder where they got their motivation from," Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) noted sarcastically on social media, referring to an incendiary message Trump shared in April—during the height of anti-lockdown protests in the state—to "Liberate Michigan!"

"This is a pattern: Trump paints a target. An attack or plot follows," tweeted Washington Post national security correspondent Greg Miller.

Gardiner told The Guardian that "the relationship between the militias and the current administration is call and response."

"It's not always clear who's leading the chant," he added. "Sometimes it's coming from the militias, sometimes it's coming from the president."

Another worrisome development is that gun sales nearly doubled between summer 2019 and 2020, meaning that the U.S. is further arming itself with "deadly weaponry [that] is increasingly finding its way onto the streets, borne by self-styled private militias, and culminating in violent clashes that have caused bloodshed in several U.S. cities," as The Guardian explained.

The New York Times estimated last month that the number of active militia members hovers around 20,000 people in 300 groups, with military veterans constituting one-fourth of those. But a new investigation by The Atlantic magazine into the Oath Keepers, one of the most prominent far-right paramilitary groups, revealed a list of nearly 25,000 current or former members, two-thirds of whom had military or law enforcement backgrounds, suggesting that the number of Americans with ties to extremist factions is larger.

As Common Dreams reported last month, armed white supremacists pose the greatest domestic terrorism threat in the U.S., according to the FBI, despite efforts by the Trump administration to downplay the risks associated with right-wing militias.

According to Gardiner's research, many of the violent incidents committed by far-right vigilantes against anti-racism and anti-police violence protesters this summer were carried out by uncoordinated groups of individuals, with no known involvement of established militias.

"There have been almost 240 incidents [this summer] where small and entirely leaderless bands of extremists coalesced online and then proceeded to take their armed fantasies on to the streets of America," The Guardian reported.

Burghart's team "has been tracking the escalation of militia activity," particularly in key swing states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where "groups have been detected discussing what they call 'voter integrity' efforts" on Election Day.

"We're paying close attention," Burghart said. As a result of Trump's "call to arms" at the first presidential debate, he anticipates that "we'll see a lot more activity from here."

Rachel Carroll Rivas, co-director of the Montana Human Rights Network, told The Guardian that online monitoring conducted by her organization has been "picking up intensifying conversation among militia groups about the legitimacy of the November 3 ballot and of the integrity of mail-in voting."

Rivas explained that "militia groups such as the Montana branch of the United States Freedom Protectors were positioning themselves to be vigilante outriders of law enforcement on Election Day," and that "the possibility of interventions by armed members of the group had to be taken seriously."

"They present themselves as protectors of property and law and order, and are now starting to talk about the election," Rivas said. "They may show up at polling places claiming to want to protect voting rights, but their impact will clearly be intimidatory."

Instilling fear and harassing voters is Trump's goal, according to voting rights advocates. Nina Jankowicz, a political scholar at the Wilson Center, wrote in The Atlantic that "confrontations between unorganized, self-appointed poll watchers and individual voters are a recipe for trouble—and a threat to a fair election."

Jankowicz stated that "if voters encounter any group discouraging or preventing others from casting a ballot, they should immediately inform a poll worker and call a nonpartisan election-protection hotline (866-OUR-VOTE is one example)."

"Election officials across the country should know they have the right to eject poll watchers for disruptions and intimidation, and can call the police if unrest develops outside the station," Jankowicz said. "And police themselves should be reminded that their job is to protect people's ability to vote, no matter their personal political preferences."

Rivas stressed that the threat of voter intimidation "really is top down." Far-right paramilitary groups "are repeating word for word what they hear from President Trump," she said.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-praised-armed-michigan-protesters-then-militia-members-reportedly-plotted-the-governors-kidnapping/

heavily armed militia members and other protesters gathered at the Michigan State Capitol in May 2020 demanding that the mask mandate be ended and the coronavirus quarantine be halted. It was during that protest that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said that she would not negotiate with terrorists.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump was tweeting "LIBERATE MICHIGAN" and praising them as "very good people" who were simply "angry."

The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire. These are very good people, but they are angry… https://t.co/N9En6o8DcP

— Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump)1588336943.0

According to the court documents it was directly after that the militia members began building a larger group to help with a plot against the Michigan governor and the violent overthrow of the state capitol.

"On June 6, 2020, CROFT, FOX and approximately 13 other people from several states gathered in Dublin, Ohio. CHS-1 was present at this meeting. The group talked about creating a society that followed the U.S. Bill of Rights and where they could be self-sufficient. They discussed different ways of achieving this goal from peaceful endeavors to violent actions. At one point, several members talked about state governments they believed were violating the U.S. Constitution, including the government of Michigan and Governor Gretchen Whitmer," said the court documents.

It was in that month that the group began to build their plot and coordinate with other militias.

It's unknown if the president or Attorney General Bill Barr were briefed on the plot or the FBI investigation. Neither have commented on the arrests.[barr says no knowledge, rep grills ilhan?]

Six of the men were taken into custody after a raid in suburban Detroit Thursday morning. They were Adam Fox, Barry Croft, Kaleb Franks, Daniel Harris, Brandon Caserta and 24-year-old Ty Garbin.

An additional seven men affiliated with a militia known as Wolverine Watchmen were also arrested. They are: Paul Bellar, 21, Shawn Fix, 38, Eric Molitor, 36, Michael Null, 38, William Null, 38, Pete Musico, 42, and Joseph Morrison, 42, cited the DailyMail.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/here-are-5-far-right-extremist-groups-or-movements-that-pose-a-national-security-threat-in-the-us/

alex h

Throughout the anti-racism protests that have rocked the United States since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, President Donald Trump and his obedient sycophants at Fox News have engaged in nonstop fear-mongering over the Antifa movement. But it isn't Antifa that is imperiling the United States from a national security standpoint in 2020 — it is far-right white nationalist and white supremacist groups and extremist militias. And on Thursday, October 8, the danger that white nationalists and militia groups pose was evident when theFBI announced that six men had been arrested in connection with an alleged terrorist plot to kidnap and possibly murder Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Six men are facing federal charges, while seven of their allies are facing weapons charges at the state level in Michigan.

The men arrested include members of the Wolverine Watchmen, an anti-government militia group, as well as allies of the Boogaloo movement. As these groups see it, Democrats like Whitmer do not hold power legitimately: the alleged would-be kidnappers, according to the FBI, planned to take Whitmer to Wisconsin after kidnapping her, put her on "trial" and execute her for treason if found guilty.And there is no reason to believe that far-right white extremists will not engage in violence in the weeks ahead if they do not like the way the presidential election is going.

Here are five extremist groups or movements to be worried about in the months to come.

1. The Boogaloo Bois

According to NBC News, some of the Wolverine Watchmen arrested in connection with the alleged terrorist plot against Whitmer are also supporters of the Boogaloo movement — which has been calling for a civil war as well as a race war and seeks the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Boogaloo members also openly advocate killing police officers. In Northern California, Boogaloo supporter Steven Carrillo was arrested in connection with an armed attack on a federal courthouse in Oakland on May 29. That attack left a security officer from the Federal Protective Service dead.

Trump's claim that Antifa is a terrorist movement is laughable. For all their militant rhetoric, Antifa do not engage in terrorist activities like the alleged plot against Whitmer or the drive-by attack in Oakland. But far-right white nationalist groups do.

2. QAnon

The QAnon movement has been identified by the FBI as a possible source of domestic terrorism, and its sympathizers are making their way to the U.S. House of Representatives. In Georgia, QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene won a congressional primary on August 11, and given how deeply Republican her district is, it is entirely possible that she will win the general election in November and be sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2021 — which is incredibly disturbing when one considers what QAnon believes. According to the QAnon conspiracy theory, the U.S. government has been infiltrated by an international ring of pedophiles and Satanists, and Trump was put in power to combat the ring. According to QAnon, an anonymous figure named Q is giving them updates on Trump's battle.

As ludicrous as QAnon's beliefs are, supporters take them quite seriously. And if Trump loses to former Vice President Joe Biden in November and QAnon members feel a sense of desperation, that could make them even more dangerous and unhinged.

3. The Proud Boys

During Trump's debate with Biden on September 29, moderator Chris Wallace (one of the more reasonable conservatives at Fox News) gave Trump every chance to condemn white nationalism and white supremacy. Instead, Trump expressed his solidarity with the far-right Proud Boys — a group of self-described "western chauvinists" who openly advocate violence and have been carrying out violent attacks against members of Black Lives Matter at anti-racism demonstrations. After Trump's endorsement, members of the Proud Boys expressed their feelings of empowerment and declared that they were ready to carry out acts of violence on the president's behalf.

Proud Boys organizer Joe Biggs, following that debate, posted, "Trump basically said to go fuck them up! This makes me so happy." By "them," Biggs was referring to Antifa. And Biggs also posted, "President Trump told the proud boys to stand by because someone needs to deal with ANTIFA...well sir! we're ready!!"

4. The Three Percenters movement

The Three Percenters aren't one specific group, but rather, a movement of far-right militias. Three Percenters are well-armed and engage in military-like training, and they have made it clear that they are fully prepared for armed struggle. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, "Percenterism is one of three core components within the anti-government militia movement, along with the Oath Keepers and traditional militia groups. The reference to '3 Percent' stems from the dubious historical claim that only 3% of American colonists fought against the British during the War of Independence.

5. The Wolverine Watchmen

The Wolverine Watchmen are among the many militia groups that believe that liberals and progressives and anti-Trump conservatives do not hold power legitimately and that it is their duty to wage armed struggle against their enemies. According to the FBI, the Wolverine Watchmen believed that Whitmer had violated the U.S. Constitution by promoting social distancing restrictions in Michigan in response to the coronavirus pandemic — and after kidnapping her and putting her on "trial" for treason, they would execute her if found guilty. But the group's activities, the FBI said, went way beyond their alleged plot to kidnap Whitmer: they also hoped to kidnap other officials in Michigan, overthrow the state government and ignite a civil war.

'Tacit endorsement': The Proud Boys are celebrating Trump telling them to 'stand by'

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/far-right-militia-groups-are-quite-capable-of-launching-a-rural-insurgency-in-the-us-political-professor

[debate]...Biden on Tuesday night, September 29 — expressed his solidarity with the far-right Proud Boys, many critics accused him of promoting violence against his adversaries. Political violence in major cities is a possibility that Trump's detractors fear, but Vasabjit Banerjee, an assistant political science professor at Mississippi State University, warns of a possible "rural insurgency" in an article published in Just Security this week.

"The intrusions of white supremacist militias into cities to intimidate and attack protestors from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement highlights the possibility of rural insurgency," Banerjee explains. "Rural insurgencies range from week-long armed rebellions against local governments, law enforcement, and the wealthy to decades-long ones against subnational and national-level security forces, which seek to impose new revolutionary regimes."

Banerjee goes on to note that white supremacist and white nationalist groups have been expressing "fears of becoming a minority group due to changing demographics."

"The targets of such fears have shifted from primarily African-Americans to include non-White immigrants," Banerjee observes. "In conjunction with racial fears, other causes include anti-Semitism as well as perceived threats to Christianity from Muslims, who have replaced Catholics as antagonists. Some scholars have observed, however, that the militias do not constitute a cohesive movement, but have many groups with varied beliefs."

Trump's "anti-immigrant nativism" and promotion of "fundamentalist Christian beliefs" have been an inspiration to far-right militia groups, Banerjee warns.

"After he assumed office — in addition to his equivocation about deadly white supremacist attacks against protestors — his administration's policies also appeared to favor militia groups by reducing monitoring by federal law enforcement," Banerjee notes. "Trump may accept pre- and post-electoral violence by such militias during the 2020 elections, as indicated by his statements about the white supremacist Proud Boys during the first presidential debate."

According to Banerjee, insurgent groups in the U.S. could have easier access to weapons than insurgent groups in other countries.

Banerjee points out, "In most countries, insurgent groups must smuggle quantities of small arms, offered by willing foreign sponsors or bought in black markets, across international borders. In the United States, however, per capita gun ownership is the highest in the world, while gun laws are some of the least restrictive. Thus, militias can legally acquire vast quantities of small arms."

Banerjee concludes the article by emphasizing that the United States' "geography" — which includes a lot of wide-open spaces — would be conducive to a rural uprising.

"The preconditions for insurgencies are already present," Banerjee warns. "Consequently, militia groups deserve more scrutiny from security forces and a unified political consensus to deter and suppress them in order to maintain peace and stability."

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-september-30-2020/

CCJ DCR narco guy // djt, emials says 2nd civ war already started, get guns

this email for patriot only your donor t

profile says exclus trump army, ID w/ pres 1st line of defense when comes to fighting off the liberal mob camo hat

GUK

https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/23/oregon-portland-pro-trump-protests-violence-texts

no lnx

Revealed: pro-Trump activists plotted violence ahead of Portland rallies

Patriots Coalition members suggested political assassinations and said ‘laws will be broken, people will get hurt’, leaked chats show

[pix Far-right organizers clashed with counter-protesters at the Justice Center in Portland, Oregon, 22 August.

Jason Wilson and Robert Evans

@jason_a_w

Wed 23 Sep 2020

Leaked chat logs show Portland-area pro-Trump activists planning and training for violence, sourcing arms and ammunition and even suggesting political assassinations ahead of a series of contentious rallies in the Oregon city, including one scheduled for this weekend.

The chats on the GroupMe app, shared with the Guardian by the antifascist group Eugene Antifa, show conversations between Oregon members of the Patriots Coalition growing more extreme as they discuss armed confrontations with leftwing Portland activists, and consume a steady diet of online disinformation about protests and wildfires.

[Facebook removes Patriot Prayer pages in bid to halt 'violent social militias'

Violent Pro-Trump Militias

The events in Kenosha are the latest in a long line of cases in which self-styled vigilantes have gathered under the banner of the “thin blue line” — a flag and movement devoted to the defense of law enforcement and the president — and engaged in violence with counterprotesters while police stood back.

Days before the killings in a Wisconsin, a so-called Back the Blue rally in Gilbert, Arizona, saw armed pro-police demonstrators beating counterprotesters while law enforcement looked on. In the run up to the confrontation, which are now a weekly event, supporters of the rally posted violent fantasies online and death threats against their critics. Days later, police in Portland stood by as gun-toting men waving “thin blue line” flags brawled with leftist protesters in the city’s streets. The clash came just weeks after Portland authorities acknowledged that a former Navy SEAL who had boasted about infiltrating “ANTIFA” was under investigation in connection with the detonation of an explosive device near protesters. Pro-police protests New York have also devolved into violence.

Armed Vigilantes Antagonizing Protesters Have Received a Warm Reception From Police

Mike German, a former FBI agent who went undercover in far-right groups in the 1990s and who is now at the Brennan Center for Justice, noted that law enforcement’s tendency to back off in the face armed right-wing protests was evident in altercations during Trump’s 2016 run for office, and has continued throughout his administration. “To see the police continuing to treat these far-right militants as friendlies is troubling,” he said. During the 1990s, German explained, law enforcement understood that the most violent members of right-wing groups, those with criminal records that exposed them to risk of arrest, did not show up at public protests. That’s no longer the case.

“There are people who have been engaged in protests in Portland for years now,” German said. “They’re well identified. I know them and I don’t live in Portland. Several of them are under court orders not to attend another protest because of the violence they’ve already perpetrated. And yet, they can engage with the police as if they’re auxiliaries. It’s really astonishing — people can point guns at people in broad daylight and not be arrested.”

[pix Alan Swinney, a member of the right-wing extremist group Proud Boys, fires sting-ball grenades as far-right demonstrators, many armed, clash violently with Black Lives Matter counterprotesters, in Portland, Ore., on Aug. 22, 2020.

Photo: John Rudoff/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images]

Data collected by the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right and shared with HuffPost Friday charted nearly 500 instances of right-wing extremists gathering in response to Black Lives Matter protests since the police killing of George Floyd in late May, leading to 64 cases of simple assault, 38 vehicle assaults, and nine cases of shots fired at demonstrators resulting in three deaths.

Among the myriad factors contributing to the political violence and unrest the country is now witnessing is an inversion of the relationship between some elements of the armed right and the federal government, Beirich argued. “The anti-government movement is no longer anti-government in the sense that the federal government is no longer its enemy,” she said. “Trump has changed that calculation — the militias, the larger anti-government world, is essentially a pro-Trump political formation.” German, who published a report this week on extremist infiltration of law enforcement agencies, described the increasingly public alignment of the far right, police on the ground, and the White House as “a widening of the umbrella” for extremist groups.

“The president has identified the Black Lives Matter protests and so-called antifa as the enemy and that sends a message to the police as to who to go after but also to these groups,” he said. “So these groups and the police seem to have aligned on a common enemy, but law enforcement is making a very big mistake if they think that because they are enemies of your enemies, they are your friends. They are not your friends, as they have demonstrated and as they will continue demonstrating as law enforcement tries to regulate their violence.”

A Surge of Far-Right Extremism

The election of Barack Obama was followed by a surge in right-wing extremist activity that then exploded under President Donald Trump, Beirich explained. “There’s been this slow drumbeat of one white supremacist attack or militia anti-government attack, and then another, and then another,” she said. “It just kept accelerating into the explosion that we’ve seen lately.”

In Obama’s second term, the surge in right-wing activity became intermingled with a visible pro-police movement that took hold in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Rittenhouse came of age during this critical moment. On Wednesday, BuzzFeed News reported that the teenager had a front-row seat at a rally Trump held in January, and was part of a cadet program at a local police department that provided ride-alongs and firearms training. Speaking to Vice News on Thursday, former classmates described Rittenhouse as a “ride or die” Trump supporter who loved “triggering the libs.”

If the notice to appear drawn up by the Antioch Police Department is accurate, Rittenhouse was born on January 3, 2003, late in the 18-month window between the September 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq. He came into the world just a few weeks before the Department of Homeland Security, and he was likely still in elementary school when the “thin blue line” flag that he included in the background of his Facebook profile became the symbol of a movement forged in reaction to Obama-era police brutality protests.

Posts Rittenhouse made on social media indicate that his worldview was drenched in a militarized culture that has animated large swaths of the country after nearly two decades of war and the emergence of law enforcement as a powerful cultural and political constituency. Embedded in that worldview is a “tactical” community with its own symbols and language, built around the idea of constant threat, good guys versus bad guys, and the sacred role of guns in maintaining social order. In a video taken before Tuesday’s killings, the teenaged Rittenhouse can be heard articulating his role at the protest in terms that echo the language of modern American police, which consistently strives to center police officers’ willingness to run toward danger.

“People are getting injured and our job is to protect this business, and a part of my job is to also help people,” Rittenhouse told a reporter from the right-wing website Daily Caller. “If there’s somebody hurt, I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle because I need to protect myself, obviously, but I also have my med kit.”

If Rittenhouse forged his political identity online in the past half decade, and it appears he did, he would have encountered a largely unchecked universe of blended pro-police and right-wing ideas, memes, and imagery, Beirich noted. “Just remember that none of the social media companies in this kid’s lifetime had really dealt with the issue of militias on their system,” she said. “He would have been exposed to every militant idea — the need for war, arming yourself — all that stuff would have been widespread where kids like this guy lived.”

Online support for Rittenhouse has exploded since his arrest, with fundraisers and “Free Kyle” memes spreading widely against the backdrop of a profoundly fraught political moment.

[pix Enrique Tarrio, chair of the Proud Boys, speaks with a police officer during the End Domestic Terrorism rally at Tom McCall Waterfront Park on Aug. 17, 2019, in Portland, Ore.

Photo: Karen Ducey/Getty Images]

From the beginning, Trump courted the hard-right edge of American law enforcement, gathering endorsements in his 2016 run for office from unions representing Border Patrol agents, ICE officers, and the Fraternal Order of Police. That courtship has continued into 2020, with the NYPD’s Police Benevolent Association, which represents 24,000 officers, throwing its support behind the president. In Philadelphia earlier this summer, a meeting between Vice President Mike Pence and the local police union also featured members of the Proud Boys, a right-wing street-fighting gang that often shows up at pro-police protests to brawl with leftists.

Trump Supporters Rush to Defend One of Their Own Who Killed Protesters in Kenosha

The killings in Kenosha came one day after a couple from St. Louis, Missouri, who used guns to threaten a Black Lives Matter protest outside their mansion, appeared as speakers at the Republican National Convention. The couple’s message, and the message of the Republicans and the Trump administration as the president seeks reelection, is that the protests that have roiled the country are a threat and that Americans, when threatened, are entitled to defend themselves. “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?” Fox News host Tucker Carlson told his millions of viewers Wednesday night. Referring to Rittenhouse on Twitter,Ann Coulter, the far-right commentator whose political views Donald Trump is known to consider as bellwether for his base, added: “I want him as my president.”

“That’s the message that’s going to be pounded every day until November 3,” Beirich said — and it should be deeply troubling. “When political figures and public figures take advantage of fraught situations in this way it always ends in violence.” Beirich added, “I can’t think of anything more irresponsible than what the RNC and Trump are doing. It’s unbelievable.”

The bullet that took Anthony Huber’s life pierced his heart, tearing through his aorta, his pulmonary artery, and his right lung. On Wednesday night, Huber’s partner, Hannah Gittings, put out a call to friends to meet at the local skatepark in Kenosha; a GoFundMe launched in his name soon raised thousands of dollars for the family he left behind. In addition to being a talented and known figure in the local skate scene,Huber’s friends remembered him as a “peaceful person” and a “defender” who “put his life on the line for others.” Gittings told a local CBS affiliate that he was the smartest, kindest, and most loving man she ever knew.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/new-report-details-how-far-right-militias-and-white-supremacists-infiltrate-us-police-departments

no lnx twt

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/kenosha-gunman-arrested-for-after-cops-let-him-flee-out-of-state/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/kenoshas-place-in-donald-trumps-politics/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/watch-out-for-the-paramilitaries-this-disturbing-prediction-about-trumps-presidency-appears-to-be-coming-true/

no lnx

"Watch out for the paramilitaries’: This disturbing prediction about Trump’s presidency appears to be coming true

July 20, 2020. Trump's unidentified federal paramilitary besiege protesters in Portland, oregon.

Written by Travis Gettys / Raw Story August 26, 2020

One of the more pessimistic warnings about a Donald Trump presidency appears to be coming true.

Right-wing militias are walking out of the anti-government shadows and standing side by side with law enforcement, and sometimes Republican Party officials, to counter demonstrations against racist police brutality.

An overnight shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, left two people dead and a third wounded during a confrontation between militia members guarding a gas station and demonstrators protesting the police shooting of 29-year-old Jacob Blake.

No arrests have been made in that case, but video shows a man armed with a rifle open fire and then calmly walk toward police officers who had been ordering the crowd to disperse, while another video shows officers giving the gunman water shortly before the shooting and thanking him for coming.

Armed anti-government groups have faced existential tension after Trump’s election, but they’ve resolved the dilemma by forming a “counter-resistance” to demonstrations against the president and law enforcement, and also by providing security to Republican groups.

...

That’s exactly the scenario that Timothy Snyder, a Yale University historian, warned against after the 2016 election.

“Watch out for the paramilitaries,” Snyder wrote on Feb. 2, 2017. “When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh.”

“When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle,” he added, “the game is over.The Trace found, just over three years ago, at least five instances in Michigan, Oregon and Texas where anti-government gun groups had aligned themselves with conservative elected officials and GOP causesThat alignment seems to be accelerating amid ongoing nationwide protests against racist police violence following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

Some of the earliest violence to erupt as part of those sustained demonstrations was allegedly touched off by a member of the Hells Angels biker gang who “wanted to sow discord and racial unrest by breaking out the windows and writing what he did on the double red doors,” according to Minneapolis police.

However, the so-called “Umbrella man” still hasn’t been arrested nearly a month after a tipster revealed his identity to police.

White supremacists posing as Black Lives Matter protesters also instigated riots that broke out late last month in Richmond, Virginia, where six people were arrested in connection with violence and vandalism. Oregon police stood by over the weekend as right-wing protesters brandished handguns and other weapons against left-wing demonstrators in Portland, and a video from early June appears to show Salem officers advising militia group members how to avoid curfew violations during a protest.

Similar scenes have played out at other demonstrations across the country, including at protests where unmasked and gun-toting protesters rail against coronavirus restrictions and threaten lawmakers as police calmly stand by.

The president sent federal agents into Portland earlier this summer to crush protests there, after gassing peaceful demonstrators across from the White House to clear a park for his photo-op, and some right-wing militia groups hailed those forces as “our Portland heroes.”Anti-government militants have been openly embracing conservative candidates in recent years, but experts on those extremist groups are increasingly alarmed by their shows of force during this summer’s protests.

“[It’s] part of their effort to normalize the presence of armed paramilitaries on the streets, which is a remarkably disturbing turn of events,” said Devin Burghart, president of the Seattle-based Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. “What we’re seeing right now is the outward manifestation of years of organizing by militia-type groups. They’ve moved from backwoods training to on-the-streets activism."

http://www.politicalresearch.org/2020/06/19/mapping-paramilitary-and-far-right-threats-racial-justice

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By Political Research Associates and the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR)

Additional research support provided by Alexander Reid Ross

We have been tracking reports of paramilitary and other far-right actors who are showing up at or adjacent to protests demanding an end to racist policing and a transformation of our carceral state. This map seeks to right-size the threat of paramilitaries to our social justice movements, neither exaggerating nor minimizing. We have confirmed 136 reported incidents since the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020, and with new reports daily there are dozens more as of yet unconfirmed incidents to review. Given the variety of groups and factions involved and types of incidents, we have divided the data into a few broad categories of actors/ideologies on the one hand and actions and tactics on the other. In most cases, the underlying data preserves more nuance and can be used to make finer distinctions.

Background

Although most people may not remember, if they ever knew, far-right paramilitaries did turn up at previous rounds of protests over police violence. For example, during the second wave of Ferguson protests, after a grand jury declined to indict the officer who killed Michael Brown, members of the paramilitary group the Oathkeepers patrolled rooftops claiming to be there to protect people and property. The heavily armed militia—which reports drawing its membership primarily from military veterans, police officers, and other first responders—was greeted with mixed reactions by protesters. Mostly they were a distraction from demands for justice and police accountability.

Now in 2020, far-right paramilitaries are once again making the scene at racial justice protests.Particularly in the last days of May, rumors circulated that large numbers of armed militia members and/or outright White Nationalists were infiltrating, disrupting protests and threatening activists. Some of the armed militias were claiming to be there to support the protestors—or at least to speak against police violence and overreach.

President Trump continues to try to divert attention to an invented threat from “antifa,” tweeting that he will have them declared a terrorist group and the Attorney General of the United States has threatened to point the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) at “Antifa and similar groups.” Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has run over 2,000 advertisements on social media since June 2, warning about “Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups,” some versions of which featured a point-down red triangle, an image used to identify political enemies in Nazi concentration camps. Even as police deployed tear gas and rubber bullets against protestors, activists and organizers were left wondering how seriously to take the threat of violence from right-wing paramilitaries.

Key Findings

The absolute number of far-right and paramilitary actors at racial justice and police accountability protests has been relatively small, typically no more than a dozen people, and often only one or two men in Hawaiian shirts and tactical gear in a sea of racial justice protestors. The exceptions have been where less organized groups of people with guns have turned up to confront an imaginary “antifa” menace, usually in smaller towns in the West.

In spite of the low numbers involved, there are reasons to be concerned. Some of the paramilitary actors are proving to be willing not just to talk about using violence to stir up chaos and provoke confrontation between protestors and the state, but to take violent action.

Steven Carillo, an active-duty staff sergeant in the Air Force, has been arrested and charged with killing a guard at the federal courthouse in Oakland. In a Facebook post before the attack, Carillo allegedly wrote: “Use their anger to fuel our fire. Think outside the box. We have mobs of angry people to use to our advantage.” Wounded in a firefight with Santa Cruz deputy sheriffs, Carillo apparently highjacked a car and scrawled “Boog” on the hood in his own blood.

Three men also connected to the Boogaloo movement were arrested in Nevada on charges of possessing explosives and conspiring to incite violence.

Other rightwing violence has been less intentionally directed toward fomenting chaos and confrontation with the state. For example in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a one-time city council candidate shot and critically wounded a racial justice protestor and assaulted several others in an attempt to defend a conquistador monument. He was subsequently defended from the crowd by members of the New Mexico Civil Guard, a militia group, though they subsequently disavowed any connection to the shooter.

Map Details

Incidents are grouped into four categories:

Harassment/counterprotest is the largest category, with 106 instances, and includes a variety of activities including verbal harassment, intimidation, those claiming to be there to protect property, prevent looting, or defend the First Amendment or engaged in the doxxing of protestors.

Violence/threat, which includes only actual or attempted violence in or around the protest space or direct menacing, such as pointing a gun or other weapon at someone.

Attended protest claiming support, includes mostly members of the Boogaloo faction, and only when they have shown through words, spoken or written, or through their actions, that they intend their presence to be in support of racial justice and police accountability, for example by carrying signs that say Black Lives Matter or Justice for George Floyd.

Law enforcement complicity is a small category in the data with large implications and refers to law enforcement officials who indicate alignment with paramilitary or far-right groups, for example by wearing a III% insignia.

The main actors that show up in our data include:

The Boogaloo, or Boogaloo Bois, is a very loose network of actors that originated online, but who have begun to show up at in-person protest actions in recent months. They are often recognizable by wearing tactical military-style gear and Hawaiian shirts. The “Boogaloo” is a code word for a new civil war, which they tend to see as inevitable, if not desirable. They have shown up in a variety of ways, including claiming support for police accountability and violence/threat.

The Oathkeepers and the III% (Three Percenters) are closely allied paramilitary or militia factions that typically claim a constitutionalist orientation—that is, that they exist to defend the Constitution from threats. Many are or claim to be military veterans or first responders of one sort or another.

Proud Boys, who define themselves as “Western chauvinists” defending U.S. institutions from leftists and outside influences. In practice, they are best known for their street brawls with anti-fascists, anarchists, anti-racists, and others. They have shown up mostly in the counterprotest/harassment category.

Other categories include armed mobs of mostly white men who have appeared after online calls to defend their communities from mostly imaginary threats of left-wing looters being bused into town. They are, as far as we can tell, not part of any organized or recognizable group. There are also a small number of explicit White nationalists, including some neonazis, who have shown up in the counterprotest/harassment lane.

The map presented here is our joint attempt to create a resource for organizers and activists, journalists and researchers, to place the threat of the far-right showing up at racial justice protests in context, more-or-less at a glance.

DHS Takes to the Streets

Four days after Floyd's murder, amid street protests in Oakland, California, an officer for the Federal Protective Service was gunned down and killed outside the federal building he was guarding. Cuccinelli called the killing of the DHS agency officer "an act of domestic terrorism," and pledged that the department would take an active role in response to the violence.

"We will stand behind our law-enforcement officers here in the department and all over America," he said.

Six weeks later, when two men were captured and charged in the Oakland assault, federal prosecutors detailed evidencethat the men were associated with a right-wing extremist group, the Boogaloo Boys, and that they had taken advantage of the chaos of the anti-racism protests to stage their assault. That fact was lost in the executive order Trump signed on June 26, expanding DHS authority to respond to "anarchists and left-wing extremists." Trump directed DHS to provide personnel to assist in the protection of "federal monuments, memorials, statues or property."

Within days, DHS officers were deployed to Portland, Oregon, where Black Lives Matter protests had continued into July, stoked by tensions that have raged for years between leftists and white extremists in the city. [pix]

The conflict escalated with the arrival of the federal officers, and while many protesters were peaceful, others in the crowd tossed fireworks at officers and pointed high-powered lasers at federal agents, temporarily blinding them. Agents clubbed protestors with batons, used tear gas to disperse the crowds, and forced protestors into unmarked vans to detain them for questioning. An unarmed 26-year-old protesterwho was holding a radio over his head suffered a fractured skull and brain injury when a DHS officer shot him in the forehead with a rubber bullet.

DHS compiled and distributed to law enforcement "intelligence reports" on journalists who were covering the clash in Portland, a practice Wolf halted after The Washington Post reported on it. Politico later reported that the intelligence-gathering on journalists occurred after Cuccinelli relaxed the civil liberties oversight process at the agency.

ref

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-defendants-charged-murder-and-aiding-and-abetting-slaying-federal-protective-service

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Two Defendants Charged with Murder and Aiding and Abetting in Slaying of Federal Protective Service Officer at Oakland Courthouse Building

Defendants Allegedly Opened Fire on Unsuspecting Officers Guarding Courthouse at Federal Building As Public Demonstrations Continued Only Blocks Away

At a press conference held this morning at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Oakland, the Department of Justice announced that murder and attempted murder charges have been filed against Steven Carrillo, the alleged gunman in the May 29, 2020, drive-by shooting that resulted in the death of Protective Security Officer David Patrick Underwood and injuries to a second security officer. The Department of Justice also announced aiding and abetting charges against Robert Alvin Justus Jr., the driver of the vehicle from which Carrillo is alleged to have attacked the guards.

...

The charges against Carrillo and Justus were brought in two criminal complaints, one filed against each defendant. According to the complaints, at approximately 9:27 p.m., on May 29, 2020, a white Ford Econoline-style van parked directly across the street from the federal building in Oakland on Jefferson Street. The van was parked facing the guard post where Officer Underwood and his partner that evening stood guard to protect the building. The van was on the southeast corner in the spot closest to the intersection with an unobstructed view of the guard post. Shortly after the van parked, a man emerged from the driver’s seat and walked around the area conducting reconnaissance for approximately ten minutes. Then, at approximately 9:43 p.m., the exterior lights of the van turned on and the van moved north on Jefferson Street toward the guard post. The passenger-side sliding door opened, and Carrillo allegedly fired multiple rounds from a firearm toward the guard post, killing Officer Underwood and injuring his partner.

The incident set off an eight-day manhunt that came to a crescendo after a witness reported an abandoned white Ford van in Ben Lomond, Calif. The van reportedly contained what appeared to be ammunition, firearms, and bomb-making equipment and an effort apparently was made to alter the van’s appearance with spray paint and a wheel covering to disguise a missing hubcap. Nevertheless, evidence from the van, led deputies from the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office to Carrillo’s residence inBen Lomond. There, Carrillo allegedly opened fire on the deputies when they arrived at his property, killing one deputy and injuring a second. During the attack there was also an explosion on the property.

The complaints describe a subsequent odyssey during which Carrillo was shot and fled the scene initially on foot, and then by carjacking a vehicle on a nearby highway. The chase came to an end when, still bleeding from his hip, Carrillo was taken into custody.

Additional evidence was recovered at Carrillo’s Ben Lomond residence included an AR-15-style short-barreled rifle fitted with a binary trigger that fired one round of 9mm ammunition at the pull of the trigger and another round at the release of the trigger. The rifle was fitted with a silencerthat suppressed the sound of gunfire from the rifle. In addition, Carrillo appears to have used his own blood to write various phrases on the hood of the car that he carjacked. The phrases relate to an extremist ideology that promotes inciting a violent uprising through use of militias.

Cell phone records from Carrillo’s phone identified Justus as a person with whom Carrillo may have been communicating in the days leading up to the drive-by shooting attack in Oakland. On June 11, while the FBI had Justus under surveillance, travelled to the Federal Building in San Francisco, met with the FBI, and was thereafter arrested for his involvement in the shooting, including hisrole as the driver of the vehicle.

The charges contained in the criminal complaints areallegations only. Carrillo and Justus are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt...

https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/07/21/three-percenters-militia-bakken-oil-oneok-domestic-terrorism

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Whose Allegiance? Three Percenters Militia Working in Bakken Oil Patch Raises Concerns of Domestic Terrorism Risk

By Justin Nobel • Tuesday, July 21, 2020

The Three Percenters, a loosely organized group of far-right militants, appear to have established a significant presence in North Dakota’s Bakken oilfield, one of the most productive oilfields in the nation. “There is a lot of membership in the oil and gas industry up there,” says Matt Marshall, a Three Percenter running for state legislature in Washington. “The fact that you have a lot of Three Percenters working in the oilfields of North Dakota is not surprising.”

The Three Percenters are so named for the dubious historical claim that only three percent of American colonists took up arms in the Revolutionary War. Their adherents have frequently been involved with incidents of ?armed protests, hate speech, and ?threatening behavior across the U.S., and the group’s members have shown up prominently at recent protests related to both pandemic response measures and police brutality.

In April, Marshall, wearing a colonial tricorn hat with bullets strapped to the side, and a Hawaiian shirt, helped lead a coronavirus stay-home order protest at his state’s capitol in Olympia, Washington. Hawaiian shirts are described by the Anti-Defamation League as a coded reference to coming civil war, although Marshall denies the link.

He says he is aware of Three Percenters who are working in oilfields in Colorado, Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Alaska. And also according to Marshall, top officials with two North Dakota chapters, the North Dakota United Patriots Three Percenters and North Dakota Three Percenter Originals, work in the oil and gas industry.

“We are mostly blue-collar workers who want to put in a hard day’s labor, support our family, pay a limited amount of taxes to get the services we require and at the end of the day be left alone,” says Marshall. “I don’t think there is any concern about having a bunch of threepersworking in that industry,” referring to an alternate name for the group.

But points of significant concern emerged in a multi-month DeSmog investigation that involved interviews with former Department of Homeland Security and FBI officials, and local residents of North Dakota, who live in a state still pumping out more than a million barrels of oil a day.

According to a whistleblower who contacted DeSmog, Three Percenters have established a prominent presence at a Bakken oil and gas facility regarded as critical infrastructure by the Department of Homeland Security. Militia-related patches, flags, and artwork have popped up across the Bakken oil patch, and a thriving gun culture among its workers has led to a Mad Max-mentality of chaos plaguing residents of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.

While federal security agencies and their partners have prioritized focus on the energy industry and produced a raft of reports in the past two decades on other risks to the nation’s critical infrastructure, such as cyber security, natural disasters, and environmental activism, right-wing militia groups appear to be escaping close scrutiny.

“It certainly seems like a security vacuum,” Michael German, a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice, told DeSmog when informed about our reporting. German is a former FBI special agent who specialized in domestic terrorism and covert operations. “The FBI characterizes itself as a domestic terrorism agency and has been outspoken about prioritizing ecoterrorism as a threat, which is ridiculous because there are no deaths with any of the environmental threats,” he said. “Yet somehow there does not appear to be an attempt to find out what the infiltration is of anti-government militia groups, and that is problematic.”

At the same time, state legislators across the country, backed by the notoriously ultra-conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, have been devising laws to target environmental activists as terrorists.

“The FBI’s approach of de-emphasizing investigations of white supremacist and right-wing militia violence while targeting resources at social justice movements and calling that extremism has existed for some time,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Security Project.

“What militias like this do is conduct surveillance and find facilities they will either need to take over or attack when ‘shit hits the fan.’”

It’s an approach that continues to play out at this very moment. In the midst of protests against the police killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans, President Trump has fanned the flames with tweets about “shooting” looters, calling MAGA supporters into action, and saying he intends to designate the amorphous leftwing anti-fascism movement Antifa as a terrorist organization.

Meanwhile, reports of right-wing militia members bringing weapons to protests allegedly in order to transform this moment into civil war have surfaced online. On May 31, Marshall’s group sent perhaps a dozen members to a small town north of Seattle in response to rumors of an Antifa threat that never materialized. And neo-Nazis, through online networks, have suggested to followers that with police forces spread thin, the present moment would be an ideal one to strike energy infrastructure targets.

DeSmog’s investigation indicates a culture of guns and paranoia has worked its way deep into the heart of America’s third richest oilfield.

Domestic Terrorism Experts Troubled by Militia’s Oilfield Presence

Paul Lehto is a 54-year-old former plant operator at the Lonesome Creek Gas Processing Plant, outside Watford City, North Dakota. During his tenure there in 2016, he says coworkers would “talk about automatic weapons all the time,” gather in common spaces to watch social media videos that featured demonstrations of people firing sub-automatic machine guns, leave articles of clothing with Three Percenter insignia lying around the workplace, and regularly wear the militia’s notorious patches, which typically contain the Roman numeral III, sometimes placed over a darkened American flag. During one conversation, he says a coworker spoke about hijacking a commercial jet.

Although Lehto says the comment may well have been in jest, it conveyed a “habit of thinking” that was worrisome and was part of his decision to eventually leave his job at the natural gas processing plant. “The constellation of issues around being a Three Percenter was probably the number one topic of conversation at work,” says Lehto. “These guys are basically supportive of the idea of some sort of eventual civil war in the United States of America.”

Paul Lehto

Paul Lehto, a ONEOK gas plant employee from 2015 to 2016, shown in 2019. Credit: DeSmog]

Daryl Johnson, an expert on right-wing militia groups who from 2004 to 2010 served as the Department of Homeland Security’s senior domestic terrorism analyst, told DeSmog that this was the first information he has received of right-wing militia presence in the oil and gas industry. He was deeply alarmed.

“These are operationally minded people with a paranoid worldview that believe at some point there is going to be a societal collapse,” said Johnson, who authored the 2012 book, Right-Wing Resurgence: How A Domestic Terrorist Threat Is Being Ignored. “What militias like this do is conduct surveillance and find facilities they will either need to take over or attack when ‘shit hits the fan.’ When they are working, they are also thinking about what else they would need to do to bring the plant to its knees. They may follow the order of their commander or act on a lone wolf instinct, and their allegiance lies not with their employer but with the militia, although they might think they are doing something righteous and good for the country.”

Lehto says that during the day shift, more than half of the 20 to 25 workers stationed at Lonesome Creek would either be wearing Three Percenter regalia and openly supportive of the militia, or be workers that he considered to be sympathizers. Three Percenters came to work there from North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Texas, says Lehto.

“I heard one Three Percenter expressing frustration and astonishment that HR did not hire his recommendation for a fellow Three Percenter, saying, ‘He is qualified, he has a great resume, and he is a Three Percenter, I just don’t understand why they turned him down,’” says Lehto. “Implied was that he had prior success with this.”

On the night shift Lehto managed the $600 million plant with just two other workers, one of whom was an active Three Percenter, the other a sympathizer. “I was just being constantly reminded of the Three Percenter presence,” says Lehto.

Protester at a confederate memorial in Louisiana waves a Three Percenter flag]

New Orleans, August 19, 2017. A man waves a Three Percenter flag as counter-protesters and protesters clash at the conclusion of the march organized by Take ‘Em Down NOLA,” an event held in solidarity with Charlottesville, days after the deadly Unite the Right rally. Credit: ©2020 Julie Dermanksy]

“I find it concerning that it is not just one, or two, or three, it is more like half the plant that are Three Percenters or supporting them rhetorically,” says Johnson. “There is a threat capability calculation we use in intelligence —capability plus intent equals threat,”he continued. “The Three Percenters definitely have capability, and they definitely have made their intent known, and the fact that they have access is even more concerning. Having the insider knowledge of how that plant operates, where that gas comes from and where it is going is all information an adversary can use for maximum threat and maximum damage. They can sabotage the plant or pipelines running from it, which may not cause a lot of deaths but can disrupt the energy supply.”

Furthermore, added Johnson, “There is also a counterintelligence threat. They have intel on critical infrastructure that, shall the need arise, they can share with people who don’t need to know.”

A 2008 Department of Homeland Security report on insider threats to critical infrastructure says insider motivations can come from, “some combination of: revenge for a perceived wrong; radicalization for advancement of religious or ideological objectives; or simple illicit financial gain.” Companies who run infrastructure like energy pipelines may misunderstand insider risks and have a financial incentive to downplay them. “Insider incidents can cause lost credibility with shareholders, employees, and customers, and negatively effect to [sic] shareholder values,” the report states. “It appears corporate leadership neither completely appreciates the risk nor realizes the potential consequences.”

The Lonesome Creek plant is operated by the Oklahoma-based oil and gas service company, ONEOK, and came online in 2015 to process the growing surge of natural gas and natural gas liquids being pumped from the booming Bakken oilfields. The plant, like all gas processing plants, is considered “critical infrastructure” by the Department of Homeland Security.

This designation goes back to the Patriot Act of 2001, which defines the term as “systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters.”

ONEOK headquarters in Tulsa, OK

ONEOK is headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Credit: Joseph Wingenfeld, CC BY 2.0]

A risk assessment of the Lonesome Creek Plant by ONEOK says a “worst-case scenario” would involve “a release of 368,536 pounds of flammable mixture” from a large storage tank and generate a wave of destruction more than a half-mile in radius.

While the risk assessment states that ONEOK has “numerous controls to prevent such releases and to manage their consequences,” they are not described in the document. Silverio Caggiano, an Ohio Fire Chief who works regularly with the oil and gas industry and has more than two decades of experience related to Hazardous Materials and Weapons of Mass Destruction, laid out reasons for continued concern. “You would need to have a pretty good background in chemistry to do something specific with a certain gas based on its properties, but if you’ve got a bunch of guys there that are all in cahoots and they decide they want to take shit out, they can pretty much do anything they want,” said Caggiano. “A person working within the system knows how the system runs.”

“From a security standpoint the Three Percenters are probably among the most worrisome groups … it is not whether there will be a right-wing attack, it is when.”

In replies to specific questions by DeSmog, ONEOK did not describe what the “numerous controls” were at the Lonesome Creek facility intended to prevent a “worst-case scenario,” nor did the company respond to requests to speak with present workers at the plant. “ONEOK expects all of our employees to know and abide by our company policies and to embrace the company’s core values of Ethics, Quality, Diversity, Value and Service,” the company explained, in a statement to DeSmog. “ONEOK’s Violence-Free Workplace Policy prohibits violence, violent acts, and threats of violence. ONEOK has implemented numerous safety and security practices to safeguard our facilities and to comply with applicable law. Clearly, the scope and nature of many of these practices and safeguards must remain confidential. We support, cooperate, and frequently coordinate with federal, state, and local law enforcement to anticipate and plan for potential security events. Furthermore, ONEOK has worked with several state legislatures to enact legislation to protect energy infrastructure from hostile actions.”

But Michael German, the Brennan Center for Justice fellow and former FBI special agent, pointed out that this legislation is typically enacted with environmentalist protest groups in mind, not militia-minded employees.

The American Legislative Exchange Council has crafted a “model” bill based on Oklahoma’s HB 1123, which calls for citizens to receive a felony sentencing, $100,000 fine, and/or 10 years in prison if their actions “willfully damage, destroy, vandalize, deface, or tamper with equipment in a critical infrastructure facility.” The bill has been replicated across the country including in Ohio, Alabama, Kentucky, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Iowa, where reporting by DeSmog in 2018 revealed that corporate backers included Koch Industries, the American Petroleum Institute, and many other oil and gas and pipeline companies.

People opposing the Dakota Access pipeline gather at Standing Rock in North Dakota, December 4, 2016.

Opponents of the Dakota Access pipeline gather at Standing Rock in North Dakota, December 4, 2016. Credit: Joe Brusky, CC BY-NC 2.0]

The FBI told DeSmog that the agency meets frequently with members of the private sector to make them aware of potential threats and to provide information on how to enhance their security.

“We have no comment on threats to specific industries or any groups,” said an FBI spokesperson. “Our focus is not on membership in particular groups but on individuals who commit violence and criminal activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security. The FBI can never initiate an investigation based solely on an individual’s race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or the exercise of First Amendment rights.”

However such statements go against research done by the ACLU, which unearthed records indicating that in the early 2000s the FBI targeted environmental groups, animal rights groups, and anti-war groups in a way that violated their First Amendment rights. A review of these episodes, published in 2010 by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General, concluded that while the FBI did not target groups for investigation based on First Amendment activities, the basis for opening some of the investigations for certain individuals was “factually weak,” the FBI “extended the duration of investigations involving advocacy groups or their members without adequate basis,” and “in a few instances the FBI improperly retained information.”

...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/white-supremacy-groups-are-hoping-to-leverage-george-floyds-death-into-their-longed-for-race-war/

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white supremacy groups are hoping to leverage George Floyd’s death into their longed-for ‘race war’

Image via Screrengrab.

Written by Mark Sumner / Daily Kos May 31, 2020

The protests that have spread across the nation in the wake of the murder of George Floyd have attracted a diverse group of supporters that go beyond local Black communities and national organizations. At events in Washington, New York, Minneapolis, and elsewhere, community activists have been joined by allies, by groups supporting Latinos, Indian groups, and even groups of Mennonite farmers speaking out in support and showing up for protests.

But, with dozens of buildings burned and Donald Trump preparing to bring in the military, there’s a growing sense that the violence in many cases isn’t originating from within the local Black community. In multiple instances, there have been incidents that seemed to spring up on the periphery of peaceful protests, leading to violent confrontations and property destruction. And increasingly, there are reports that these events are not originating organically from the protests or from confrontations between protesters and the police. There is a very real feeling that white supremacists are using this moment to create incidents designed to justify still more violence and suppression.

peanut butter cup

@deshawnieboy

Raw footage of who started the looting in Oakland at Walgreens. Had just seen them three blocks down hitting some other businesses. All prepared with hammers. Don’t let them say different.

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With dozens of protests across the nation, not every event is the same. For example, it’s not hard to see what sparked this incident Atlanta, where a police officer slams a bicycle into a Black woman for having the audacity to wave a finger at him while saying “Don’t touch me.” It’s clear that the violence in this particular moment originated direct from the police.

Brittany Miller

@Brittm_tv

WATCH: I was recording when the first clash between police & protestors broke out in Atlanta. @cbs46 #cbs46 #news #GeorgeFloydprotest

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But in some of the most publicized incidents across the nation, there seem to be a singular nature to some of those involved, as in this recording in which what appears to be a young white man in camo pants and military boots paints graffiti on a federal building.

Fin Gomez

@finnygo

The protest then headed to in front of the White House. A protester was taken by the USSS in front of Pennsylvania Ave into an adjacent federal building. Unclear what he did.A couple men then splintered off from the group and spray painted “F*ck Trump” on the building. @cbsnews

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Or this group which is, reportedly, shown attempting to smash store windows in Minneapolis, with the group initiating this action appearing to be led by a number of white people.

Joy Reid

@JoyAnnReid

May 30, 2020

Replying to @lewoofl

Yes we are. Absolutely.

Barbara Stiles

@Dovewoman1

This from @Mikel_Jollett

It shows the instigators clearly. They are white. Organized with walkie talkies. pic.twitter.com/zPhBoSg3fE

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And those on the ground reported similar events at other protests in many locations.

Asia

@AsiaJannelll

I was at Downtown Oakland protests a little while ago. Let me say something; the people breaking glass, breaking into windows & starting fires were WHITE men wearing all black. They had hammers and walkie talkies. They were organized. BLM protestors did not start the violence!

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Repeatedly, from eye witnesses and from officials, have come claims that violence in the protests is originating not with those who live in the community, but with others who have appeared to take advantage of this moment.

Joy Reid

@JoyAnnReid

Remarkable info coming out of this presser: Gov. Tim Walls, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and now MN attorney general Keith Ellison ALL alleging outside forces, domestic and possibly foreign, have post-Tuesday infiltrated the state, and are

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And, as Vice reports, far right extremists are trying to use this situation in hopes of bringing about their much-desired “race war.”That effort involves both showing up at protests with guns, initiating violence, and taking to computers to urge everyone involved toward more tragic confrontations. Even the Hawaiian shirt-wearing “Boogaloo Bois” have appeared at some of the protests. The possibility of using these protests as a precipitating incident, and calls for white supremacist militias to confront protesters, are dominating discussion boards and social media for these groups.

This is also generating some genuinely bizarre events.

Fox Wound

@foxwoundband

Atlanta has deployed a child militia at Lenox Mall fitted with riot shields and batons. What the actual fuck is going on?

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The extent to which those trying to instigate more widespread violence are behind the incidents of property damage and physical clashes remains unclear. What is absolutely clear it that white supremacists are hoping to leverage yet another example of violence against an individual Black man as an excuse to carry out a campaign of expanded violence against the entire Black community.

Following closely on the heels of the police murder of Breonna Taylor and the recorded lynching of Ahmaud Arbery—as well as decades in which police violence has been repeatedly excused—there’s no doubt of the weight of grief in the Black community, or the justified anger. But there are definitely those who are seeking to turn this moment from one in which those suffering injustice are finally heard, to one in which that injustice is “justified” and made worse.

And with Donald Trump calling Nazis in Charlottesville “very fine people” and protesters in Minneapolis “thugs,” there seems little doubt about which side he is ready to join.

Joy Reid

@JoyAnnReid

May 30, 2020

Replying to @JoyAnnReid

And the governor says he has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, and fully mobilized the MN National Guard for the first time in 164 years. This is a continuing story and presumably we will begin hearing it echoed in other cities.

Joy Reid

@JoyAnnReid

Mayor Carter said EVERY person arrested last night during the protests was from out of state. The governor said it is at least 80 percent, and that they will begin releasing the names. Dept of Safety Commissioner John Harrington says they are contract-tracing arrestees:

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ref

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/pkyb9b/far-right-extremists-are-hoping-to-turn-the-george-floyd-protests-into-a-new-civil-war

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Far-Right Extremists Are Hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a New Civil War

Armed extremists are showing up to protests and urging a "boogaloo" — code for civil war — online.

By Tess Owen

May 29 2020, 2:57pm

Far-right extremists are showing up, with guns, to the protests against police brutality that have exploded across the country.

Others are egging on the violence from behind their computers, urging followers to carry out acts of violence against black protesters with the goal of sparking a “race war.”

Their presence makes an uneasy addition to the escalating unrest, which was triggered by the death of George Floyd, a black man who was choked to death by a white Minneapolis police officer earlier this week.

But there’s a range of motivations that’s driving far-right interest toward the protests, which are being led by community members and Black Lives Matter, and bolstered by antifascists.

For example, the so-called Boogaloo Bois — a group of armed anti-government extremists made visible by their Hawaiian shirts — have reportedly shown up to some of the protests.

READ: The cop who kneeled on George Floyd's neck was just charged with murder]

The “boogaloo” is code for impending civil war or violent confrontation with law enforcement, and that’s what they’re hoping to get out of the protests. Their main reason for being there is their antipathy toward law enforcement, and so they’re trying to position themselves as allies of Black Lives Matter protesters. They’ve made police brutality one of their central issues, which was explored at length in a Bellingcat article this week.

Their approach to police brutality links the victims of the deadly standoff with federal agents at Ruby Ridge in 1992, to the victims of modern police brutality, including Floyd. But unlike the vast majority of protesters, they refuse to acknowledge the fact that police brutality is an issue that disproportionately impacts people of color.

There have been scattered reports of Boogaloo Bois’ presence at the protests, which were compiled by a Bellingcat investigative journalist in a thread. He includes an audio clip (stripped of video per activists’ requests) ofprotesters saying they’d wrestled a handgun from a “white nationalist” agitator — whom he describes as a Boogaloo Boi who became overly rowdy.

READ: New video shows three cops kneeling on George Floyd as he lay dying]

Another photo, shared across private Boogaloo Facebook pages, showed one of their own unfurling their trademark flag during the Minneapolis protests.

And one protester posted a picture of himself wearing a gas mask to Instagram, under the hashtag #Boogaloo.

While some Boogaloo Bois say they’re just libertarians, others will, on occasion, veer into racism — and make no secret of their desire for violence. In addition to their physical presence at the protests, the #boogaloo hashtag on social media has been flooded with memes in the last couple days egging on violence, and talking about how they hope this is the beginning of a civil war.

While more established militia types sometimes share those perspectives, they often view themselves as intermediaries between law enforcement and civilians. For example, two armed white men were interviewed by the Minnesota Reformer, a local independent news organization, outside a tobacco store in Minneapolis this week. They said they were protecting businesses from looters, but were also there to defend civilians should they need to.

“Cops are less likely totread on people’s rightswhen there’s other armed people around them,” one of the men told the interviewer.

Local activists identified another group in Minneapolis as members of the III% militia, one of the largest militia networks in the U.S.

But perhaps the most troubling of all are the hardcore “accelerationists” who are encouraging their neo-Nazi followers to go to the protests and carry out acts of violence against black people — all with the goal of “exacerbating the ethnic tensions” and sparking a “race war.”

Accelerationists promote violence to speed up the collapse of society. Aneco-fascist Telegram channel wrote to its nearly 2,500 subscribers on Thursday that “a riot would be the perfect place to commit a murder.” Accelerationists often seek to exploit moments of political or civil unrest, and the widespread protests that have unfolded across the country fit the bill. Similarly, 4chan is full of racists cheering the violence and saying that they hope it’s the beginning of a “race war.”

Cover: Protesters are trapped between police and other protesters who gathered in a call for justice for George Floyd following his death, outside the 3rd Police Precinct on May 27, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images)

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

aha: ~ stay@home is a hub

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/05/05/facebook-go-platform-organizing-protests-against-social-distancing

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Facebook Is Go-To Platform For Organizing Protests Against Social Distancing

May 05, 2020

Hatewatch Staff

As COVID-19 continues to pose a lethal threat worldwide, fringe, right-wing activists are using Facebook to mobilize protests of stay-at-home orders in several states.

In a review of Facebook event pages, Hatewatch identified more than 50 rallies from April 13 through May 1. The event pages are being set up all across the nation regardless of which political party controls the state house.

Facebook has become the social media platform of choice for far-right organizers and activists who engage in protests against social distancing.

“Unless government prohibits the event during this time, we allow it to be organized on Facebook,” a spokesperson for Facebook told Hatewatch via email.

The majority of these rallies run afoul of recommendations from health experts. They allow extremists, however, to reinforce the spread of far-right conspiracy theories and disinformation about COVID-19.

In Lansing, Michigan, hundreds of protesters rallied Thursday as Republican House legislators voted to not extend Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s state of emergency. The American Patriot Rally event, organized by theMichigan United for Liberty group, called for the reopening of local businesses.

The rally first spread through Facebook before the platform decided to pull the event page. Late Thursday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the state capital building, ignoring social distancing recommendations. In some cases, demonstrators carried firearms and were seen peddling QAnon slogans and COVID-19 conspiracies.

Alex Jones

Alex Jones, radio host and creator of the website InfoWars, left, shakes hands with a demonstrator during a "You Can't Close America" rally outside the Texas State Capitol in Austin on April 18. (Photo by Alex Scott/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Antigovernment figures such as Alex Jones are capitalizing on these gatherings to advance the message that federal institutions can’t be trusted. In the days leading up to an April 18 rally in Austin, Texas, hosted by Infowars, promotional content was circulated on Facebook. Once on the ground, Jones accused the Texas state government of enacting “martial law” and told attendees, “We don’t live in fear of some made up virus. We know the globalists and the media are the enemy.” In far-right circles, the term “globalist” is frequently used as an antisemitic slur.

PMAZ flier

A flyer for the Patriot’s Day Rally circulates on Patriot Movement AZ’s Facebook page.

Similarly, in Phoenix, Arizona, the hate group Patriot Movement AZ shared “Patriots' Day Rally” flyers and memes in the lead-up to the April 20 rally in Phoenix. Although the group frequently dabbles in anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, the content shared aligned with common antigovernment talking points. In one instance, a member of the group’s Facebook page who goes by Brent Backus shared an image stating: “Quarantine is when you resist the movement of sick people. Tyranny is when you restrict the movement of healthy people.”

Militia organizations also did their part to vilify government institutions. TheSouth Carolina Light Foot militia shared details on their page for the “Drive to Thrive SC” gridlock event. Similar to other extremist groups, the South Carolina Light Foot Militia also used its Facebook page to rile up its base ahead of the April 24 event.

“Maybe we can put all the sick people in boxcars and take them to someplace safe, oh wait…” read one of the memes in an attempt to equate the government’s response to COVID-19 to that of life under the rule of Nazi Germany.

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The South Carolina Light Foot militia stoked fears recently as they claimed yellow badge-style patches are in the near future for vaccinated individuals.

Other militia leaders such as John Cody, state commanding officer of the South Carolina Light Foot Militia Special Response Team, jumped on the bandwagon using Facebook to advertise a national May Day Rally.

Cody, who uses the codename “Hawkeye,” was a key organizer for the Jan. 29 Militias March on Richmond rally. The march, which was organized mainly on Facebook, was scheduled to coincide with the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL) gun event. VCDL was hoping to put on a show of force for gun owners who stood in opposition to state bills that were aiming to adopt new gun restrictions. Cody’s rally ultimately helped bring together a number of right-wing militias with established gun rights organizations.

Cody post

Militia leader John Cody recently circulated two different flyers on Facebook for his May Day rallies.

Along with Cody, Virginia state Sen. Amanda Chase, R-Chesterfield, has been rallying her supporters to protest. Chase, who was involved in a number of controversial incidents earlier in the year and was subsequently ousted from her local GOP committee, has been sympathetic to far right causes. She made a personal appearance at the January VCDL gun rally where she joined several antigovernment militias in an attempt to protest new gun legislation.

Amanda Chase

Virginia state Senator Amanda Chase at work in the statehouse in Richmond. (Photo by Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Chase recently got on Facebook and shared details for several rallies against social distancing scheduled in Richmond, encouraging her supporters to attend, saying “Share with those who believe in Liberty, Freedom and pursuit of Prosperity, …not liberalism.”

Kayla Gogarty, a Media Matters senior researcher who has been tracking these rallies since they first appeared on Facebook, told Hatewatch: “We found that a lot of these Facebook groups and a lot of these events are including members of local militias and members of some local anti-vax groups. We’ve seen a lot of far-right figures attend some of the events like the Proud Boys. We’ve seen pro-gun activists and antigovernment extremists at these rallies and some local government officials as well.”

A Hatewatch analysis of Facebook posts earlier last month aligned with much of what Gogarty has seen in recent weeks, with the platform being a hotbed for COVID-19 misinformation.

Facebook touts response as rallies materialize

As first noted by the tech website The Verge, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is still heavily touting the billion-dollar company’s projects aimed at helping minimize the spread and impact of COVID-19. Facebook has donated $100 million to small businesses in a gesture made to help them through trying times. The social media company has alsoteamed up with Carnegie Mellon University to roll out a global symptoms survey to Facebook users in an effort to track COVID-19 growth. These initiatives come as Facebook is simultaneously failing to provide a clear solution for countering the spread of disinformation and anti-public health organizing on its own platform.

Owen Shroyer

Infowars host Owen Shroyer arrives at the Texas State Capitol building on April 18 in Austin. (Photo by Sergio Flores/Getty Images)

In an April 20 interview with ABC News, Zuckerberg emphasized that “the stuff that people are saying that is false around a health emergency like this, can be classified as harmful misinformation that has a risk of leading to imminent physical danger and we’ll just take that kind of content down.”

Complicating matters is the fact that not every state and country has instructed citizens to stay home. According to The New York Times, “42 states, three counties, 10 cities, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico” have adopted stay at home orders as of April 28th. This means that if protests occur in states where stay at home orders were never adopted, Facebook faces less pressure to take immediate action.

A general search on Facebook for rally terms such as “liberate” and “reopen” brings up a plethora of groups that oppose social distancing.

The decision to hold off on pulling down content that rails against social distancing undermines the work the company has done to help survey and map the spread of COVID-19. The networking site may have taken down a handful of conspiracy posts, but the antigovernment rhetoric contained in the rally posts has the potential to expose people to greater amounts of misinformation.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/the-far-right-wants-to-make-its-shared-fantasy-of-violent-civil-war-a-reality/

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The Age of Conspiracy Theories in which we are now immured has produced a kind of bastard offspring: the Shared Violent Fantasy. Exhibit A is the “Boogaloo,” the far-right’s ironic name for the long-sought “second civil war” they believe is on the verge of erupting in the United States—and in which the ongoing novel-coronavirus pandemic has become a virtual petri dish for cultivating the fear of societal collapse essential to their worldview.

Like many conspiracy theories, and all such fantasies, the “Boogaloo” has a powerful tendency to produce real-life violence from people who absorb the underlying paranoid values and believe in them fervently. A recent incident in Texas in which a self-proclaimed “Boogaloo Boi” set out to murder a police officer in order to help spark the civil war underscores the extent to which the believers are likely eventually to attempt manifesting their fantasies—which can entail violence not just against authorities, but sometimes even their unsuspecting neighbors.

Aaron Swenson is a 36-year-old Texarkana man who frequented “Boogaloo”-related Facebook pages with some frequency, sharing their frequently violent memes and indulging the usual violent rhetoric in the comments. Eventually, he reached a point where he decided to act on it.

The world of “Boogaloo” on social media—particularly on Facebook, where over 125 such pages reside—is riddled with references, both direct and obscure, to their eagerness to begin a civil war by shooting law-enforcement who attempt to enforce gun-control measures, or for that matter any other measures that attract the ire of the far right. Recently, these have come to include COVID-19 lockdown and social-distancing measures.

The universe it occupies resides in a bubble of conspiracy theories and “constitutionalist” fantasies, but with a distinctly alt-right edge. Irony abounds everywhere:adherents wearHawaiian shirts as a reference to “the boog,” or the “Big Igloo” (the “Boogaloo” flag features an igloo and a palm tree). Their memes reference “Pepe the frog,” white-nationalist OK signals, and the common shared belief that nefarious communists are plotting to confiscate their guns and enslave them in concentration camps. This fantasy is the justification for their announced intention to begin shooting their fellow citizens, especially those who work for the federal government or police.

On the night of April 11, Aaron Swenson began livestreaming from his pickup truck, telling his audience that he was out hunting a police officer—anyone would do, he wasn’t particular—to shoot and kill, all in order to start the “Boogaloo.” He told them he was seeking a lone cop to “ambush and execute.”

People began calling the Texarkana Police Department, which promptly found the page and figured out both where Swenson was located and what kind of vehicle he was driving. Upon locating him, he fled a squad of police cars at high speed, eventually grinding to a halt well after his tires were flattened by a spike strip. “He was wearing an armored plate carrier type vest when we arrested him, and officers found several loaded weapons inside his truck,” the police department’s Facebook post reported.

At his own Facebook account, Swenson liked more than a dozen pages that mention boogaloo in their names, as a report from the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) on the “Boogaloo” phenomenon described. It also noted that “some users leaving comments on the profile on the night of the attempted attack endorsed the targeting of police officers, while others suggested calling 911 in response to the live broadcast.” The two videos were active on the Facebook page at the time of the report, having amassed over 1,500 and 3,400 views, respectively; however, they have since been removed by Facebook.

Swenson has been charged with making terrorist threats against an officer, evading with a vehicle and illegal possession of a weapon.

He is not the first such “Boogaloo” enthusiast intent on making the shared fantasy into a violent reality. In January, three would-be terrorists from the neo-Nazi organization The Base were arrested by the FBI, charged with plotting to wreak havoc with their weapons at a planned anti-gun-control march in Richmond, Virginia, around which “Boogaloo” rhetoric was already rife.

A few days later, three more “Boogaloo”-loving members of The Base were arrested in Georgia for plotting to assassinate a local antifascist couple, as well as overthrow the local county government.

At the Richmond rally, the “Boogaloo” was a major theme—flags, signs, and social-media posts from the event all referenced and celebrated it—that continued even afterward during the debate in Virginia over its gun-control laws.

And just as the white-nationalist, conspiracist and “accelerationist” right has sought multiple means to exploit the novel-coronavirus pandemic, the “Boogaloo” theme has become a louder topic of discussion on far-right telegram channels. The lockdown measures instituted by governors around the nation in response to the virus have particularly provided ample evidence for the conspiracists—in their minds, at least—of their long-running contention that “globalists” are seeking ways to enslave the world.

Signs referencing the “Boogaloo” have popped up at a number of the far-right-led protests against the lockdown measures. One marcher at the “ReOpen” rally in Topeka, Kansas, on April 23 carried a large black “Big Igloo” flag.

There has also been a certain amount of somewhat predictable crossover between the “Boogaloo” element and the far-right conspiracists of the Trump-loving QAnon world, some of whom have also been acting out violently during the pandemic—notably the locomotive engineer who attempted to ram the USNS Mercy with a train engine.

According to QAnon expert Travis View, the “Boogaloo” has become the preferred fallback position for people swept up in “The Storm” theories, believing that one day soon there will be mass arrests of leading liberal and media figures for their roles in a global child-trafficking ring, and increasingly disappointed at its failure to materialize.

“If that change doesn’t come, some of the followers have made reference to what they call Plan Z,” View says. “If the whole Q operation fails, then Plan Z is sort of equivalent to what the far-right extremists call the ‘Boogaloo.’ Which is civil war, basically.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has sharpened the interest in a civil war. The TTP report found that most of the 125 Facebook groups devoted to the “boogaloo”—some 60%—were created in the very recent past (within three months), just as the states began declaring lockdowns and social-distancing measures. Perhaps more worryingly, “they have attracted tens of thousands of members in the last 30 days.”

In several private boogaloo Facebook groups that TTP was able to access, members discussed tactical strategies, combat medicine, and various types of weapons, including how to develop explosives and the merits of using flame throwers. Some members appeared to take inspiration from President Donald Trump’s recent tweets calling on people to “liberate” states where governors have imposed stay-at-home orders.

Despite these findings, TTP notes, Facebook has been slow to remove these pages. One of the most prominent—Thicc Boog Line, which specializes in selling branded “Boogaloo”-themed gear and clothing—attracts thousands of readers. It has recently been pitching messages to its readers emphasizing the opportunity to wreak “boojahideen” havoc during the time of a pandemic.

These findings resonate with a similar report issued in February by :{the :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{Network Contagion Research Institute,:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: warning that “domestic militants” are organizing around memes to “incite violent insurrection and terror against government and law enforcement.”

The boogaloo, a joke for some, acts as aviolent meme that circulates instructions for a distributed, viral insurgency for others.The topic network for boogaloo describes a coherent, multi-component and detailed conspiracy to launch an inevitable, violent, sudden, and apocalyptic war across the homeland. The conspiracy, replete with suggestions to stockpile ammunition,may itself set the stage for massive real-world violence and sensitize enthusiasts to mobilize in mass for confrontations or charged political events.

Daniel E. Stevens, executive director of Campaign for Accountability, the umbrella organization under which TTP operates, told Christopher Mathias of HuffPost in a statement that “Facebook’s failure to stop their platform from being used as an organizing tool for extremists is completely unacceptable.”

“There is nothing subtle about how these extremist groups are using Facebook’s platform to advance their cause,” Stevens said. “Boogaloo proponents are not simply discussing ideas or political views; they are directly advocating for violent action and tactically planning how to defeat government entities.”

“Boogaloo” enthusiasts indeed have detailed plans for how to achieve their goals, both militarily and through propaganda, as the TTP report details. However, government and law enforcement are not the only targets that “Boogaloo” memes discuss. A subcurrent in a number of the violent fantasies that they express in their memes is the idea of committing home-invasion robberies targeting their relatively hapless and untrained neighbors as a means of thriving during the civil war—or a pandemic.

Another featured a photo of an angry Joaquin Phoenix in Jokerwith the script: “When you dispatch the normie with ease to raid their stash because they stocked up on TP and not ammunition”—with a subscript across the bottom reading: “You get what you fucking deserve.”One popular meme among Facebook “Boogaloo” followers was one that showed a SWAT-style armed raid team in military gear massing outside a door, with the script: “Me and my boys going for a grocery run at my asshole neighbor’s house.” Another features a grid of graphics demonstrating military hand signals during a raid, all of which are interpreted in the language of a home invasion: “Shoot that dog.” “Cover up the evidence.” “I found cocaine. It’s pretty good.” “Wrong house. Let’s boogie!”

These ideas are not particularly new among the more openly cynical participants in far-right conspiracism and survivalism. Indeed, they were openly elucidated back in 2014 by a “Patriot” movement survivalist named Tyler Smith, who was featured on an episode of National Geographic’s TV series Doomsday Preppersboasting about his plans to invade the homes of his neighbors—particularly those who might also be preppers, since they would make better targets.One of the more commonly shared of these memes actually makes fun of other “preppers,” particularly those who are suddenly new to the business amid the pandemic. It shows a “Virgin Prepper” who is “always scared, can’t sleep at night,” and “has no fun,” then contrasts him with an obviously fun-loving “Chad Raider” who “Takes your good shit and burns all the rest so no one else can have it,” and is seen holding up a bag marked “All Your Shit.” He’s also “not scared of death or coronavirus.”[vid]

“We’re not in it to stockpile,” he proclaimed in a segment that was used to promote the show. “We’re in it to take what you have, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us. We are your worst nightmare, and we are coming.”

He told the show’s producers that he only had a few months’ supplies for his family because he intended to aggressively assault his neighbors and steal their food and weapons caches.

“All your shiny ARs, your high-powered .308 rifles, your 50,000 rounds of ammo, are all going to be ours,” he said on the show.

Smith was arrested by the sheriff of Pierce County, Washington, where he resided at the time, shortly after his appearance on national TV, because he wielded multiple guns on camera in the segment, and he was already a felon (on a sexual-behavior-with-a-minor charge) forbidden from owning weapons. He spent a couple more years in prison for that, but was back on the streets by late 2016.

He was most recently spotted marching in Portland with Patriot Prayer—the far-right street-brawling group led by Joey Gibson of Vancouver, Washington—at one of its 2017 demonstrations. Gibson, as it happens, has been active in the anti-coronavirus-lockdown protests, traveling to Seattle and Olympia for protests.

Those protests, of course, featured plenty of “Patriots” wearing Hawaiian shirts underneath their body armor—a signal for what the “boojahideen” like to call “the Big Luau.” The chief organizer of the “Boogaloo” motif in Olympia was Matt Marshall, the leader of the III Percent of Washington, a “Patriot” militia group based in Eatonville, Washington, and a close ally of both Gibson and state Rep. Matt Shea, the far-right legislator whose plan for a post-breakdown society called for the execution of all non-believers.

These violent fantasies keep mounting in number and vehemence. The question increasingly is what spark will inspire them to attempt to make them manifest.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/reopen-protests-stir-up-the-far-right

right-wing protest events against states’ stay-at-home orders and nonessential business closures have sprouted up across the country, attracting far-right activists who see a friendly avenue for their own extreme messages.

Protesters rallied in at least six states last week in opposition to measures taken to curb the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, including orders to avoid public spaces, cancel social events, and close businesses deemed nonessential. The ”Reopen” events are the manifestation of a push by a powerful coalition of right-wing groups, including FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, and the Heritage Foundation, to advance the reopening of the U.S. economy.

The Michigan Freedom Fund, a group linked to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ family, is helping organize the state events on Facebook, and NBC News found that a family-run network of pro-gun Facebook groups is responsible for some of the largest protest pages.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the protests have received glowing coverage in right-wing media. Fox News has advertised the protests while the network’s hosts have spoken favorably about participants. The sudden spark of big-donor groups, state organizing, and right-wing media coverage invokes strong parallels to the astroturf origins of the Tea Party movement.

Minutes after a Fox News segment Friday about the protests, President Donald Trump tweeted, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!,” “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!,” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” All three states are led by Democratic governors.

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NBC News reported that Trump’s tweets led right-wing extremists online “to speculate whether the president was advocating for armed conflict,” which extremists have spent decades claiming is inevitable in the United States. According to NBC News, the Network Contagion Research Institute recorded a major spike in the term “boogaloo,” which is a phrase popular with far-right extremists online to refer to a supposedly inevitable modern civil war.

In Michigan, protests reportedly attracted members of the violent hate groups, anti-government militias, anti-vaccination groups, and religious-right fundamentalists. The Guardian reports GUK that members of the Michigan Proud Boys hate group participated in a vehicle convoy, and an activist from Michigan Liberty Militia whose Facebook page “features pictures of firearms, warnings of civil war, celebrations of Norse paganism and memes ultimately sourced from white nationalist groups like Patriot Front” was interviewed by local radio.

At the Texas state capitol in Austin last weekend, members of the Infowars entourage including conspiracy theorist Alex Jones reportedly attracted hundreds of protesters for a rally called “You Can’t Close America” organized byInfowars host Owen Shroyer.As Right Wing Watch reported earlier this month, Shroyer had threatened to encourage the Infowars audience into “revolting” against social distancing measures if they were not lifted in a week.After protests in Michigan last Wednesday, Shroyer followed through on the promise and announced the Texas rally, which anti-vaccine activists attended.

[A QAnon supporter is seen protesting at an anti-quarantine rally in Olympia, Washington, on April 19, 2020. (Photo courtesy of Troy Schulz)]

The Colorado Times Recorder reported that “anti-vaccination activists, conspiracy theory advocates (including a Q-Anon supporter) and members of the Proud Boys hate group” were present at a “ReOpen Colorado” rally Sunday. Nathan Bernard reported that a “ReOpen Maine” rally Monday was organized in part by a state representative who “is known locally for spreading white nationalist conspiracy theories,” such as the claim that abortion and immigration are part of a plot to eliminate white people.

Protesting against stay-at-home orders has become a common cause for those among the far-right ranks. By calling COVID-19 a big hoax, asserting that the threat is overblown for political reasons,and advancing conspiracy theories about the search for a coronavirus vaccine, right-wing activists and media figures have created an environment for these protests to take hold. Meanwhile, unabashed extremists see the “Reopen” protest movement as fertile ground for their agendas–whether it be fomenting a rebellion against the government or targeting minority groups for hate.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/radical-right-wing-paramilitary-group-recruits-texas-cops-for-bloody-civil-war-report

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radical right-wing paramilitary group recruits Texas cops for ‘bloody civil war’: report

Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Rally. Far-right Oath Keepers patrol Emancipation Park. Credit: Anthony Crider https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story February 29, 2020

According to a report from the Star-Telegram, a senior member of the rightwing paramilitary group Oath Keepers who moved to Texas in 2015 is actively recruiting local law enforcement employees while telling them a “bloody civil war” against the U.S. government is on the horizon.

The report states that John D. Shirley, the national director of the Las Vegas-based Oath Keepers finagled himself a job as a county constable in Hood County which provided him with access to other police officers and now he is using his position to recruit.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Oath Keepers organization is “one of the largest radical antigovernment groups in the U.S. today” with, reportedly, thousands of members made up of former law enforcement officials and military veterans.

The Star-Telegram reports that Shirley’s “Oath Keepers of Hood County” drive was scheduled at a local golf course earlier in the week before being canceled by the management because they felt the group had misrepresented itself when they booked the meeting place.

The report notes that Shirley has attempted to allay fears about the group’s intentions despite claims on their own website about a coming “New World order” and antisemitic rhetoric, that goes hand-in-hand with their unyielding defense of gun ownership.

According to Shirley, in column for the online publication Hood County Today, the Oath Keepers are not “anti-government” because, as he wrote, “I am a public servant OF the government,” before adding, “The U.S. Constitution, the document this organization holds as sacrosanct, is the foundational document of our GOVERNMENT.”

The report notes that local law officials say there is no policy that bans police from joining the group which has one local running for sheriff extremely concerned.

According to Vance Keyes of Fort Worth, “I am absolutely concerned about militia groups infiltrating law enforcement. Their presence in policing undermines our obligation and ability to provide impartial justice … free from the thinly veiled, and often outright, racial bias that exist in such organizations.”

He added, “They destroy sincere efforts to strengthen police/community relations in minority communities. Their anti-government rhetoric is also an affront to police professionals that take seriously their obligation to public service and the rule of law.”

You can read more here.

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Fort Worth Star Telegram

A paranoid militia infiltrating Texas police is bent on rebellion, ‘ready to rise up’

BY BUD KENNEDY

FEBRUARY 28, 2020 09:26 AM

FORT WORTH

A revolution-minded, conspiracy-bent militia group named the Oath Keepers is recruiting law officers in Hood County to take up arms in what the founder predicts will be a “bloody civil war” against the U.S. government.

A national director of the Las Vegas-based Oath Keepers, John D. Shirley, moved to rural Hood County in 2015 and has been appointed by county commissioners as a constable, giving him both access to confidential information and a political platform to recruit more militia members.

A regional recruitment rally announced for Monday was canceled by Harbor Lakes Golf Club, citing misrepresentation. It was supposed to launch Shirley’s “Oath Keepers of Hood County” chapter.

The Oath Keepers’ current recruiting pitch focuses on gun rights and the Second Amendment. But unlike other gun libertarians, the Oath Keepers promote paranoid fears of a “New World Order” conspiracy and spread veiled anti-Semitism in distrusting “elites,” similar to discredited Austin showbiz personality Alex Jones.

Mainly, the group asks for money. Its website begs law officers and veterans to militarize and also pay $1,200 for a “lifetime membership” or $50-$120 for annual memberships.

“They view themselves as ready to rise up” to oppose the government, said Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League, which watches militia hobbyists and so-called patriot-movement groups along with monitoring neo-Nazis and race or religious hate groups.

Officially, the Oath Keepers are nonpartisan and nondiscriminatory. The ADL labels the group as “anti-government extremist.”

But the group rose in 2009 along with the Tea Party months after the election of President Barack Obama.

Founder Stewart Rhodes had worked and campaigned for U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, a gun-libertarian Republican.

IMG_3398.jpg

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes at a 2013 rally in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Tyler Tjomsland AP/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW]

In a Jan. 22 speech posted on the Oath Keepers’ Facebook page, Rhodes claimed Americans have a legal right to the same weapons as the U.S. military.

“A weapon of war is what you want in your hands,” he said.

Accusing “pencil-neck lawyers” in government of conspiring against gun owners, Rhodes said “they know we will resist. And that’s precisely why they want your semiautomatic rifles. ... They are useful in resisting tyranny.”

The Oath Keepers’ mantra is a list of 10 “Orders We Will Not Obey” — say, turning cities into concentration camps, or forcing Americans into detention camps.

Neither seems likely in Hood County.

At the height of the recent debate over new stricter Virginia gun laws, Rhodes said in a speech: “We are being pushed towards a revolutionary war.”

He blamed presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg and Democratic campaign donor George Soros, both of Jewish descent, using the term “elites.”

“Texans beware — they’re coming for us,” he said.

[IMG-3405.JPG

Constable John D. Shirley of rural Hood County is on the national board of Las Vegas-based Oath Keepers. WWW.CO.HOOD.TX.US]

Shirley, a retired Houston police officer, has said he was one of Rhodes’ first allies in 2009 and spoke at a2009 Tea Party rally, calling for law officers and veterans to organize. He has been described as the group’s law enforcement recruiter.

He operates a false Twitter account, “@HoodCoTxConst2,” that is labeled the public office’s official Twitter feed but actually contains personal political content.

It uses the official badge as artwork. Commenters or those sending direct messages may falsely believe they are sending information to a law enforcement agency and not to a political account.

[IMG-3406.JPG

A false Twitter account uses a county badge but promotes Constable John D. Shirley’s political views. TWITTER.COM/HOODCOTXCONST2]

The badge appears to be used illegally for a private political account.

In a guest column in the online publication Hood County Today, Shirley wrote that the Oath Keepers shouldn’t be called anti-government, because “I am a public servant OF the government.”

He went on: “The U.S. Constitution, the document this organization holds as sacrosanct, is the foundational document of our GOVERNMENT.”

His Oath Keepers plans were first reported in the Hood County News..

Hood County Judge Ron Massengill did not return a message asking about Oath Keeper infiltration of law enforcement.

Sheriff Roger Deeds left a message saying he is not a member of the Oath Keepers but “I have heard of it.”

One of Shirley’s two opponents Tuesday in the Republican Party primary, Keith Martin, responded to a message and said he is not a member but “I am aware of the organization.”

Shirley’s other opponent, James D. Edwards, did not return messages left on both his personal and campaign Facebook pages.

I asked a Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office spokesman whether our county has a policy against outside memberships in militias like the Oath Keepers.

Tarrant County has no policy. Sheriff Bill Waybourn of Dalworthington Gardens had no comment.

His Democratic opponent, Vance Keyes of Fort Worth, had plenty of comment.

Keyes wrote by email that the Oath Keepers have no place in law enforcement.

“I am absolutely concerned about militia groups infiltrating law enforcement,” Keyes wrote.

“Their presence in policing undermines our obligation and ability to provide impartial justice ... free from the thinly veiled, and often outright, racial bias that exist in such organizations.

“ They destroy sincere efforts to strengthen police/community relations in minority communities. Their anti-government rhetoric is also an affront to police professionals that take seriously their obligation to public service and the rule of law.”

The Oath Keepers are selling poison. And charging $1,200.

BUD KENNEDY

Columnist Bud Kennedy is a Fort Worth guy who covered high school football at 16 and has moved on to two Super Bowls, seven political conventions and 16 Texas Legislature sessions. First on the scene of a 1988 DFW Airport crash, he interviewed passengers running from the burning plane. He made his first appearance in the paper before he was born: He was sold for $600 in the adoption classifieds.

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Reddit Virginia Ceci Freed / Media Matters

A pro-Trump subreddit is full of calls for violence in response to proposed Virginia gun safety laws

Reddit bars content that “encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm”

WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN

PUBLISHED 12/19/19 9:32 AM EST

Users on Reddit’s “r/The_Donald,” a prominent subreddit for supporters of President Donald Trump, have repeatedly issued calls for violence in response to proposed gun safety laws in Virginia, despite Reddit’s policy barring content that “encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm.”

The subreddit has already been quarantined by Reddit for past violations of that policy, but users have recently posted messages warning that “we’ll have no constitutional option but to give them the bullets,” claiming that “if it’s time to hide your guns, it’s time to use them,” and urging people to “exercise their second amendment on their government today.” Users have also posted that “not only is [violence] inevitable but it is necessary” and that this “ends with patriots shooting at an oppressive government and driving them out.” One user expressed a willingness to go “straight for the governor's mansion” as part of “a road trip to Virginia that might cost me my life.”

Reddit prohibits content that “encourages,” “incites,” or “calls for violence,” and the site previously quarantined “r/The_Donald” for violating the policy

Reddit: “Do not post content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm.” From the site’s “account and community restrictions” section:

Do not post content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people; likewise, do not post content that glorifies or encourages the abuse of animals. We understand there are sometimes reasons to post violent content (e.g., educational, newsworthy, artistic, satire, documentary, etc.) so if you’re going to post something violent in nature that does not violate these terms, ensure you provide context to the viewer so the reason for posting is clear.

If your content is borderline, please use a NSFW tag. Even mild violence can be difficult for someone to explain to others if they open it unexpectedly. [Reddit, accessed 12/18/19]

Reddit previously quarantined “r/The_Donald” for violating this policy. In June, Media Matters reported on multiple “r/The_Donald” users violating this policy by issuing calls to violence against Oregon law enforcement. Soon after, Reddit quarantined the subreddit, meaning it would no longer appear on the main Reddit feed. In a message shared by a moderator for “r/The_Donald” that explained the decision to quarantine the subreddit, a Reddit administrator wrote that “we are troubled that violent content more often goes unreported, and worse, is upvoted.” [Media Matters, 6/24/19; The Verge, 6/26/19; Reddit, accessed 12/18/19]

Reddit has previously banned multiple subreddits in violation of this policy. Reddit “shut down several Nazi and white supremacist subreddits” in 2017 because of its policy regarding inciting violence, according to The Verge. In 2018, the site banned the largest subreddit dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy theory, citing “repeated violations of the terms” of its content policy, NBC News reported, noting that the forum was “host to a stream of violent threats.” And on June 20, the platform banned the subreddit “r/frenworld,” which “featured racist and anti-Semitic Pepe the Frog-style cartoons,” with a spokesperson saying it “violated rules against encouraging and glorifying violence,” according to The Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer. [The Verge, 10/25/17; NBC News, 9/12/18; Twitter, 6/20/19]

Users of “r/The_Donald” have posted in support of violently opposing proposed gun safety laws and their potential enforcement

Virginia’s governor has proposed gun safety bills and said there will be “consequences” for law enforcement officials who refuse to enforce the bills if they become law. Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has proposed a series of gun safety bills for the next legislative session. In response, multiple counties in the state have declared themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries,” adopting largely symbolic resolutions that say they will not enforce what they deem to be unconstitutional gun laws. Rep. Donald McEachin (D-VA) suggested that Northam use the commonwealth’s National Guard to enforce the bills if they become law, and Northam has warned of “consequences” if localities refuse to enforce new gun laws, adding that he would “cross that bridge if and when we get to it.” The Twitter account for the Virginia National Guard has tweeted that it had “not received any requests from the Governor, or anyone on his staff, about serving in a law enforcement role related to any proposed legislation” and encouraged residents to “be patient while we allow our elected officials to work through the legislative process.” [CNN, 11/6/19; WSLS, 12/12/19; Newsweek, 12/13/19; Twitter, 12/13/19]

Users on “r/The_Donald” have posted calls to violence against state government officials. In response to the discussion about the Virginia National Guard and the proposed gun safety laws, multiple users on the subreddit “r/The_Donald” have issued calls for violence to prevent the potential enforcement of the proposed laws.

A user wrote that, “If I have to take a road trip to Virginia that might cost me my life, I'm not fighting the guard.” Instead they claimed they would be “joining which ever band is going straight for the governor's mansion” because “it's the only way to strike fear into these tyrants in other states who are thinking this sounds like a great idea.”

The Donald subreddit Virginia1

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

Another user wrote that “as long as we're gonna have the gang together we should head west and teach Californian politicians a lesson too.” In response to a comment about possible “civil conflict,” the same user wrote that violence was “not only … inevitable but it is necessary.”

The Donald subreddit Virginia2

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

One user argued that “it may be time this has to play out” because “the Virginia legislature or governor cannot remove the second amendment.”

The Donald subreddit Virginia3

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

A user claimed that Virginia’s governor is “waging war on us” and that “the world is about to find out how powerful the 2nd amendment really is.”

The Donald subreddit Virginia4

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

A user argued that it was “time to ammo up” in response.

The Donald subreddit Virginia5

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

Another user argued that “when they cannot help but go for the guns, we'll have no constitutional option but to give them the bullets.”

The Donald subreddit Virginia6

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

A user encouraged “everyone [to] grab your Brown Besses,” a type of firearm used during the American Revolution.

The Donald subreddit Virginia7

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

In response to a recommendation that users “zero those sights” on their weapons, another user questioned which ammunition would be best used against law enforcement.

The Donald subreddit Virginia17

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

One user wrote that they would “have to finally drop coin on an AR15 and ammo if it's coming to this.”

The Donald subreddit Virginia10

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

Another user claimed that “if it’s time to hide your guns, it’s time to use them.”

The Donald subreddit Virginia11

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

A user suggested that it was “time for people in Virginia to move or to exercise their second amendment on their government today.”

The Donald subreddit Virginia12

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

A user responded to a post about police enforcing proposed gun safety bills by simply writing “cocks shotgun.”

The Donald subreddit Virginia13

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

A user wrote that this was “how it begins,” and that it “ends with patriots shooting at an oppressive government and driving them out.”

The Donald subreddit Virginia14

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

A user claimed to know “several Mississippians down here that would be willing to help you Virginia patriots out if thinks kick off.”

The Donald subreddit Virginia15

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

In response to a comment urging Trump (“45”) to “step in,” a user wrote, “.45 acp maybe,” referring to a popular type of ammunition.

The Donald subreddit Virginia16

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

A user wrote in response to the proposed bills that if violence occurs, “that will be the price you'll have to pay for liberty,” adding former President Thomas Jefferson’s quote that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

The Donald subreddit Virginia18

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

Another user also cited Jefferson’s quote in response to Northam’s proposed bills.

The Donald subreddit Virginia22

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

One user argued, “If they start a war, we need to do what people typically do in a war.”

The Donald subreddit Virginia19

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

A user wrote that they “hope” that “every militia in Virginia is getting prepped for war.”

The Donald subreddit Virginia21

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

A user wrote that if “they want a war, the patriots in Virginia will give them one.”

The Donald subreddit Virginia20

[Reddit, accessed 12/17/19]

748 COMMENTS

A pro-Trump subreddit is full of calls for violence in support of Oregon Republicans

06/24/19 2:45 PM EDT

Right-wing media push QAnon-linked hoax claiming a kid was jumped for wearing a MAGA hat

12/18/19 11:52 AM EST

A white nationalist created a hoax about gun confiscation that is leading to calls for violence on social media and message boards

12/18/19 10:17 AM EST

Media Matters for America

meh

https://theconversation.com/theyre-not-all-racist-nut-jobs-and-4-other-observations-about-the-patriot-militia-movement-125032

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/texas-border-militiaman-is-now-a-federal-fugitive-vowing-to-make-himself-a-martyr/

no lnx vid

Texas border militiaman is now a federal fugitive vowing to make himself a martyr

Written by David Neiwert / Daily Kos July 30, 2019

A Texas militiaman who led a border-watch operation and was later convicted in 2015 on federal weapons charges has announced that he is becoming a fugitive after a warrant was issued for his arrest—and is vowing that he won’t be captured again.

Kevin Lyndel “KC” Massey, a 53-year-old from Quinlan, is the subject of a Federal Marshals Service warrant issued last week naming him “Most Wanted,” and warning that he is “armed and dangerous,” and moreover “has reportedly made threats to kill law enforcement that attempt to arrest him.”

It appears he intends to make himself a martyr to the “Patriot” cause in the mold of LaVoy Finicum, the Utah man shot in January 2016 by Oregon State Patrol officers after he refused arrest related to the armed standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

On his Facebook page, Massey posted a warning:

KC is done playing the game of unconstitutional courts that already cost him 3+ years in federal prison for not even violating the law as written. The judge said in his statement, that the conviction was based on court precedent not on the written letter of the law. The feds continued to subject KC to theirtyranny after release from prison, while serving a double jeopardy sentence of 3 years probation. KC is NOT going to allow himself to be kidnapped again. Death before dishonor!

Massey was arrested in 2015 by federal agents at the Mexico border, where he had been involved in an ongoing effort by a group of “Patriot” militiamen to prevent crossings by would-be immigrants at the Rio Grande. The group—who called their operation “Camp Lonestar”—was among the first such militias to actually detain border crossers with wrist ties and hold them for detention by Border Patrol.

The first arrest at the camp occurred when a participant named John Frederick Forrester, also a convicted felon, had an encounter in the brush with a Border Patrol officer that drew the agent’s gunfire. When more federal agents arrived to pursue a tip that Forrester was not the only armed felon in the camp, they found Massey—who had a 2003 conviction on his record—also in possession of a gun.

Massey had become the chief media spokesman for Camp Lonestar, which had begun operating initially under a veil of secrecy. As is inevitably the case with such operations, rather than actually clamping down on illegal crossings, the group’s presence actually just complicated an already difficult situation. It also fairly dripped with conspiracist paranoia.

Camp Lonestar was particularly notable for its harassment and detention of would-be border-crossers. In one video, the militiamen could be seen rounding up a group of immigrants and holding them for Border Patrol. Massey posted an explanation on Facebook afterwards: “Sorry we had to ‘Detain’ them,” he wrote in a comment. “[B]ut they were wore out and just fell down and gave up while the other 7-8 ran like gazelles!”

As the post explained, the militiamen detained the people—described as Honduran, Guatemalan, and Mexican—after they encountered a group of about 11 border crossers, most of whom took off through the brush. The three men they kept were “ziptied, debriefed,and given water,” and U.S. Border Patrol officers eventually arrived and took them away.

“WE DO NOT AIM TO DETAIN, we would much rather send them back into the river into Mexico and dissuade them and the cartel from crossing on the property we patrol,” the post explained. “All encounters were conducted in a humanitarian, professional fashion. Stay vigilant. Thank you for your support.”

But behind the guise of humanitarian treatment was a not-so-subtle smirking contempt. “One of the guys pissed himself!” remarked Massey. Another chimed in, “Dude pissed himself bad.”

Massey, the camp’s “commanding officer,” had appeared in numerous videos posted on Facebook and elsewhere that showed the activities involved in Camp Lonestar. They also featured their rationalizations for harassing people at the border: “I’m not anti-immigration,” he told reporters. “I have no problem with immigrants. I have a problem withterrorists. I have a problem with people who are coming to this country to hurt my fellow Americans and to destroy my fellow Americans’ property and livelihood.”

After Massey’s arrest, Camp Lonestar largely crumbled apart and ceased operation. The landowner whose property they operated from, Cuban “Rusty” Monsees, later told reporters that the experience “wasn’t that great.” “They jeopardized my safety and some other people’s safety by what they were doing,” Monsees said.

Massey pleaded guilty in September 2015 to the federal weapons charges and served three years in prison. After his release, he remained on parole, but continued to claim that he had been unjustly prosecuted. The conditions of that parole appear to have led him eventually to revolt, which in turn brought the most recent warrant for his arrest.

One of Massey’s supporters penned a blog post suggesting that Massey was now following Finicum’s example of deliberate martyrdom:

One thing I do know, like LaVoy, he will live to his last day out in the open, not in a cage…I don’t know about anyone else reading this but I don’t want another good patriot killed because thegovernment didn’t want their dirty secrets revealed or the “virus” known as the Constitution spreading. I refuse to lose another good friend. I will do everything in my power to keep that from happening.

Commenters on Facebook not only supported this view, but suggested that Massey’s case might inspire a larger revolt. “10s of thousands doing the same thing only way this stops is if any and allmoron parasites and workers for them are removed every attempt they make to steal lifes time or propertythey should at no time ever be allowed past to do it to another,” one of them wrote.

Another suggested that a team armed militiamen should intervene on Massey’s behalf, saying that “a team of solid mother fuckers need to grow a pairand hear his story and decide if they will help if not he will be killed in cold bloodor put in prison its that simple a facebook set of balls will do nothing,” he wrote.

https://www.ecowatch.com/up-in-arms-new-book-2638990950.html

Tara Lohan

When armed militants with a grudge against the federal government seized the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in rural Oregon back in the winter of 2016, I remember avoiding the news coverage. Part of me wanted to know what was happening, but each report I read — as the occupation stretched from days to weeks and the destruction grew — made me so angry it was hard to keep reading.

That's why I picked up John Temple's new book Up in Arms: How the Bundy Family Hijacked Public Lands, Outfoxed the Federal Government, and Ignited America's Patriot Militia Movement.

I wanted to see what I'd missed. And I wanted to understand the extremist ideologies that continue to dominate many discussions in the American West.

Temple, an author and journalism professor at West Virginia University's Reed College of Media, provides a page-turning account of both the 2014 standoff in Bunkerville, Nevada, that launched scofflaw rancher Cliven Bundy and his family into the national spotlight and the 2016 occupation of Malheur, led by Bundy's sons Ammon and Ryan.

"It's obviously an exciting story with cowboys and guns and takeovers and standoffs," Temple told me about the book. "But it sheds light on public lands issues, environmental issues, on questions about how the government should handle these situations and the urban-rural divide in this country."

The book also delves into the history of the Sagebrush Rebellion,a western U.S. movement against federal ownership of public lands that ignited in the late 1970s and has continued to smolder in the decades since.

The Bundys, who still subscribe to this line of thinking, refused to recognize the Bureau of Land Management's authority over the public land where they graze their cattle (or the federal government in general). That ultimately led — after 20 years of federal agencies looking the other way — to an armed standoff in which the FBI attempted to seize the rancher's cattle after years of unpaid grazing fees and mounting fines.

Spoiler alert: It didn't end well for the government.

Temple then chronicles the play's second act, during which the Bundy sons engineered the takeover of the federally run Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for more than a month. The pretense was defending local Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond, who were sentenced to jail for federal land arson, but who actually eschewed the Bundys' help. The occupation turned out to be more of a publicity stunt than anything — one that ended in spectacular failure (although the Bundys insist it was a success). In the process they also trashed the refuge headquarters and racked up a $9 million tab for taxpayers.

While Up in Arms gives a detailed view of the ideology that motivates the Bundys, the story is much bigger than them. It's also an exploration of the motivations of some of the most hardline anti-federal militants in the country — not just the Bundys, but the ragbag collection of so-called Patriot movement followers that flocked to their ranch, even when most of them lacked understanding of public-lands issues and the cause they were backing.

In fact, Temple said, he first came to the story of the Bundys researching an unrelated project about militias. As a result there's not much in the book about the underlying environmental issues at the heart of the Bundy actions, including the impact of renegade ranching on public lands.

But Temple writes about the personal histories of many of the supporters who turned up for the initial showdown in Bunkerville and others who joined the occupation at Malheur. He reveals the power dynamics among different Patriot militia groups as they jockeyed for media attention and acolytes.

While the Bundys honed their talking points in scores of interviews about their anti-government rhetoric and their calling from God to act on it, Temple said that most of the other Bundy supporters didn't have much political inspiration or well-formed ideologies.

"I think some of these folks were motivated on a very personal level where they have trouble with authority and that kind of thing," he said. "Every individual seemed to have a different set of grievances or issues that were driving them, but it coalesced around a few things:Distrust of the federal government and the feeling that the federal government was overreaching in its authority, and the Second Amendment."

What could go wrong?

As Temple writes, a lot went wrong on both sides of the confrontation between the government and the militias. This was on full view when the Bundys and their compatriots eventually faced their day in court.

If you've ever wondered, as I did, how the leaders of an armed insurrection that occupied federal property, degraded public lands, and terrorized government workers escaped punishment, it's explained here in great detail. Temple writes about not just the court proceedings that followed the standoffs but the main players on the federal government's team, including FBI leadership involved in Bunkerville. A series of bumbles and missteps ultimately led to the prosecution's ultimate failure.

There's no happy ending, unless you believe divine providence is shining down on the Bundy clan. But Temple's book paints a useful picture of the simmering, ongoing range war in the West and the havoc an unlikely alliance of right-wing groups can wreak when they converge.

That's the most sobering part of the book: It's likely a preview of things to come.

Reposted with permission from our media associate The Revelator.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Up in Arms: How the Bundy Family Hijacked Public Lands, Outfoxed ... ›

===

Several members of the Three Percenters of Oregon, a group that joined in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge takeover in 2016, chimed in on various social media posts Friday that they were willing to provide Oregon Republican Senators who walked out of the state Capitol “security.”

Oregon’s Republican leadership confirmed Thursday morning that they were leaving the state to avoid providing quorum for a vote on House Bill 2020, a massive climate bill that Democratic leaders have pushing for years to pass.

UPDATE 8:09 p.m.: ‘Militia threat’ shuts down Oregon statehouse

All 11 Oregon Senate Republicans were nowhere to be found Friday morning when Senate President Peter Courtney called the Senate into session, and then – when a quorum was not present – announced a recess.

Oregon’s Republican leadership confirmed Thursday morning that they were leaving the state to avoid providing quorum for a vote on a massive climate bill that Democratic leaders have pushing for years to pass.

Members of the Three Percenters of Oregon, a group that joined in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge takeover in 2016, are offering to will provide the Republican Senators “security” and “refuge.”

===

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/22/threats-militia-provoke-shutdown-oregon-capitol-day-after-gop-lawmakers-fled/

---

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/06/armed-extremists-just-escalated-oregons-fight-over-climate-legislation/

he Three Percenters’ Oregon chapter has gotten involved in the Oregon standoff between Republican state senators, who fled the state to avoid the passage of cap-and-trade legislation, and the Democratic majority who wanted to put the measure to a vote. The paramilitary group, known for anti-government and pro-gun sentiment, said in a Thursday night Facebook post, “We will stand together with unwavering resolve, doing whatever it takes to keep these Senators safe,” pledging to provide “security, transportation, and refuge” for Republican lawmakers.

As my colleague Shane Bauer wrote in 2016, “the three percenter philosophy” had “quickly grown into a grassroots, national movement, part of a resurgence of right-wing militia activity following Obama’s election in 2008.”

This is the most recent escalation of the conflict that began when the Oregon House of Representatives passed a bill Monday that would impose a declining limit on the amount of CO2 emissions Oregon’s manufacturing, utility, and transportation industries can produce. But when Senate president Peter Courtney was ready to begin Thursday’s session, Oregon’s Republican senators fled the Capitol to make a vote impossible to hold.

There are 18 Democratic senators, but 20 senators are needed for a quorum. A search of the Capitol on Monday yielded no Republicans, so Governor Kate Brown sent out Oregon State Police troopers to find the senators, who hid outside state lines, and bring them back to vote by force.

“The Senate Republicans have decided to abandon their duty to serve their constituents and walk out,” Brown said in a statement authorizing the Oregon State Police to bring back the Senate Republicans.

Without the Republicans present, there were not enough Democrats to constitute the necessary quorum of lawmakers to conduct official business, even though they would have had enough votes to pass the bill. There’s only about one week left in the legislative session.

“I beg and beseech my fellow legislators to come to the floor,” The Oregonian reported Courtney saying, as he placed his head in his hands. “If you’re mad, take it out on me. Come at me. Don’t do this to the people of Oregon.”

The tactic of walking out to prevent bills one party opposes from being passed isn’t unique to either Oregon or Republicans. As the Associated Press pointed out:

In 2003, Texas Democrats fled to neighboring Oklahoma to deny a quorum, holing up in a Holiday Inn to block a GOP redistricting bill. The Democrats returned to Texas after the bill’s deadline passed, and it was effectively killed.

Legislative minorities, both Democratic and Republican ones, have used walkouts as a strategy several times in Oregon alone, including in 1971, 1995, 2001, 2007, and May 2019.

In a statement by Oregon Senate Republicans released Thursday, Senate Republican Leader Herman Baertschiger, Jr. explained the reason for the walk out, describing it as the will of the people of Oregon. “Protesting cap and trade by walking out today represents our constituency and exactly how we should be doing our job,” he said. “It’s time for the majority party to consider all Oregonians—not just the ones in Portland.”

One Republican senator has already threatened a more violent response. “Send bachelors and come heavily armed,” said Brian Boquist in a video captured by Pat Dooris of KGW News in Portland. He said he told Travis Hampton, superintendent of the Oregon State Police, “I’m not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon. It’s just that simple.”

But the Republican spokesperson from the Senate was quoted in a tweet on Friday afternoon, turning down the offer of assistance.

---

The Three Percenters’ Oregon chapter has gotten involved in the Oregon standoff between Republican state senators, who fled the state to avoid the passage of cap-and-trade legislation, and the Democratic majority who wanted to put the measure to a vote. The paramilitary group, known for anti-governmentand pro-gun sentiment, said in a Thursday night Facebook post, “We will stand together with unwavering resolve, doing whatever it takes to keep these Senators safe,” pledging to provide “security, transportation, and refuge” for Republican lawmakers.

As my colleague Shane Bauer wrote in 2016, “the three percenter philosophy” had “quickly grown into a grassroots, national movement, part of a resurgence of right-wing militia activity following Obama’s election in 2008.”

There are 18 Democratic senators, but 20 senators are needed for a quorum. A search of the Capitol on Monday yielded no Republicans, so Governor Kate Brown sent out Oregon State Police troopers to find the senators, who hid outside state lines, and bring them back to vote by force.

“The Senate Republicans have decided to abandon their duty to serve their constituents and walk out,” Brown said in a statement authorizing the Oregon State Police to bring back the Senate Republicans.

"I beg and beseech my fellow legislators to come to the floor,” The Oregonianreported Courtney saying, as he placed his head in his hands. “If you’re mad, take it out on me. Come at me. Don’t do this to the people of Oregon.”

The tactic of walking out to prevent bills one party opposes from being passed isn’t unique to either Oregon or Republicans. As the Associated Press pointed out:

In 2003, Texas Democrats fled to neighboring Oklahoma to deny a quorum, holing up in a Holiday Inn to block a GOP redistricting bill. The Democrats returned to Texas after the bill’s deadline passed, and it was effectively killed.

Legislative minorities, both Democratic and Republican ones, have used walkouts as a strategy several times in Oregon alone, including in 1971, 1995, 2001, 2007, and May 2019.

In a statement by Oregon Senate Republicans released Thursday, Senate Republican Leader Herman Baertschiger, Jr. explained the reason for the walk out, describing it as the will of the people of Oregon. “Protesting cap and trade by walking out today represents our constituency and exactly how we should be doing our job,” he said. “It’s time for the majority party to consider all Oregonians—not just the ones in Portland.”

One Republican senator has already threatened a more violent response. “Send bachelors and come heavily armed,” said Brian Boquist in a video captured by Pat Dooris of KGW News in Portland. He said he told Travis Hampton, superintendent of the Oregon State Police, “I’m not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon. It’s just that simple.”

But the Republican spokesperson from the Senate was quoted in a tweet on Friday afternoon, turning down the offer of assistance. ..[twt]

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/christian-militia-mocked-after-video-intended-to-scare-enemies-of-christ-hilariously-backfires/

self-styled Christian “militia” that calls itself the Legion of St. Ambrose was buried in ridicule over the weekend after it posted a video of its members dressed all in black in an effort to intimidate so-called “enemies of Christ.”

In a tweet posted on June 9th, the Legion of St. Ambrose showed a video of its members carrying flags while dressed in ninja-like outfits.

“The cowardly, those who countersignal, do-nothings, traitors, the enemies of Christ, and the enemies of those who serve Him shall be dabbed on,” the group wrote in a message accompanying the video.

[vid]

Far from frightening its enemies, however, the Legion’s video drew widespread ridicule, as several social media users mocked the groups costumes and compared them to live-action role players — or “LARPers” — who dress up and play games of Dungeons and Dragons out in the woods.

The group’s manifesto calls for the abolition of “homosexuality, pedophilia, transgenderism, and any other unnatural sexual orientatons/acts” and also supports “a return to a patriarchal society, where the home and nation is upheld by traditional sex roles.”

Check out some of the reactions to the Legion’s video below....

===

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Militia_movement

militia movement is a domestic terror threat largely American subculture consisting primarily of disaffected, rural, white, right-wing Christians who believe that the federal government's authority is either broadly abused or outright null and void, and that the American people must form armed paramilitary groups in order to stand up to Washin'tun and make their voice heard. The movement was mostly active in the early-mid 1990s, and appears to have made a comeback following the election of Barack Obama, though it is not as powerful as it was at its peak.

Well regulated?

They draw their name from the "well-regulated militia" clause of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.^[Note ^1] While they are ideologically rooted on the far right wing of the political spectrum, they are often distrustful of the Republican Party mainstream (especially the neoconservative and neoliberal wings of the party), and often base their beliefs in paleoconservatism, libertarianism, or some mixture thereof instead. The growth of the militia movement in the '90s was heavily intertwined with that of the "Christian Patriot" movement, a radical right-wing subculture infused with survivalist rhetoric about impending economic collapse and societal breakdown, along with conspiracy theories about the federal government, big business, gun control, the United Nations, the Roman Catholic Church, and other nefarious forces that the "real" America had to be reclaimed from.^[1][2]

While the militia movement does experience plenty of cross-pollination with white nationalists, anti-Semites, and other elements of the radical right, most observers view this as secondary to the movement's chief anti-government, conspiratorial ideology.^[2] Indeed, during the movement's height in the '90s, a number of black separatist groups took up the ethos of militias,^[Note ^2] using arguments about "Fourteenth Amendment citizenship" to claim that black people constituted a legally separate nation. Today, it attracts a large number of pro-Israel Christian Zionists who see the Jews as allies against the "coming global jihad". There is also the Jewish Defense League, closely ideologically associated with the deceased Meir Kahane's defunct and outlawed Kach party. From the other side, parts of the alt-right, which openly embraces racism, have come to see "Patriot" groups like the Oath Keepers as not extreme enough for their liking due to their rejection of explicit white supremacy.^[3]

Many of these groups conversely view themselves (or frame themselves to the public) as groups of citizens organized and ready to be called on by local government when needed, and that private citizens' militias such as theirs were the "original intent" of the Founders for national defense and assistance with local law enforcement. This is a half-truth. While it is true that, historically, government agencies (from the local sheriff to the state) have called upon private citizens during times of emergency or temporarily deputized private citizens, and most state constitutions include definitions of the "unorganized militia" as all adult males (usually between a certain age range, 18 to 45) for this purpose, it is a leap of logic to conclude this sanctions the formation of private paramilitary organizations not organized by nor recognized by the government. The concept is "all adult males", not a private group of people holding decidedly fringe views proclaiming themselves "the" militia.

The movement is most heavily concentrated in rural areas, suburbia, and old Rust Belt cities in "red state" America, where it is buttressed by traditions of rural populism and (in the southern US) Confederate apologia. The politics and message of the movement tend to appeal most to those people who have been uprooted by the economic changes brought by globalization — family farmers, small business owners, blue-collar workers, "Reagan Democrats", and others in the working class and lower-middle class end of the spectrum — while at the same time masking the real causes of these changes, instead blaming their problems on liberals, foreigners, urban elites, and shadowy cabals of "globalists" and "international bankers" seeking to destroy the American way of life.^[4] These same politics also serve to repel those in the big cities, where cosmopolitanism, feminism, and multiculturalism are facts of life rather than "creeping outside forces", where the economies are driven by white-collar professional occupations (like finance, health care, and high technology), and where even conservatives tend to be more Catholic, Jewish, mainline Protestant, or even non-religious than evangelical or fundamentalist.^[5]

Besides conspiracy theorists and survivalists, the movement also attracted a heavy admixture of whackers and mall ninjas during its heyday in the '90s, although most of them left once it became clear the movement was also a magnet for dangerous anti-government paranoids like Timothy McVeigh.

Legality of militias

Many militia groups claim to be a modern incarnation of the "minutemen", the guerrilla fighters, colonial militia, and backwoodsmen who fought and harassed British soldiers during the American Revolution. One tendency within the militia subculture, the "Three Percenter" (or III%) movement, places a special emphasis on this connection, rooted in the myth that only 3% of America's able-bodied men actually fought the British during the Revolution (the real number was closer to 15% over the full course of the war) and that a similarly small, dedicated movement could do the same to "liberate" the US from home-grown tyranny. Ironically enough, this idea is not too dissimilar from Marxist vanguardism, which makes a lot more sense once you realize that Mark Vanderboegh, the man who came up with the idea, was once a New Left activist in the '60s and '70s before he converted to libertarianism.^[6]

At least a few militias claim to be available to their states for defense purposes. However, many, if not most, states have laws against private armies such as these or any sort of paramilitary organization not directly authorized by state or federal government. Fortunately for militias, these laws often stipulate that a "private army" involves, among other things, being paid (which effectively every militia lacks), making the average militia not a private army according to a strict reading of the law. As such, they are, by and large, allowed to exist nearly entirely unmolested instead of being shut down by the hundreds.

Legally speaking, the National Guard (which is not any sort of citizen militia), is considered the "organized militia" under US federal law (state laws generally include the State Defense Force as well, if they have one), while the "unorganized militia" is all males of a certain age according to the same law.. The Civil Air Patrol also serves as a civilian auxiliary of the US Air Force. Twenty-two states plus Puerto Rico also have their own "state militias" or "state defense forces" separate from the National Guard and under the sole command of the Governor, though training standards vary wildly. Most state defense forces are very lightly armed, if at all, and work primarily to augment the National Guard for peacetime duties, such as combating wildfires and providing aid to disaster areas. Community emergency response teams (CERTs) and neighborhood watches serve a similar purpose at the local level. In addition, during the Cold War there existed various civil defense and continuity of government programs at the federal, state, and municipal levels, though much of this infrastructure has since fallen into disuse.

To the extent that there is a citizen (or "unorganized") militia, it is a concept found in state constitutions used to bridge a gap in federal law declaring all able-bodied males between 18 and 45 to be part of the "militia". Should the "unorganized militia" need to be called to service at the federal level, one might presume that the proper way to do so would be to enact a draft using the Selective Service infrastructure. Things in the US would probably have to be quite bad for it to get to this point, as conscription had been discontinued in 1973. Historically, private citizens have been "drafted" (or "deputized") at the state or local level under the "militia" clause on a temporary basis, usually to help with emergency services, but while this was common in the 1800s it is very rare today. For example (and to show why this isn't that popular anymore), firefighters used to be "drafted" from the local tavern in places where there was no regular fire department, but this inevitably led to problems with arson by unemployed people needing a quick job.

Antecedents

While the modern militia movement first took shape in the 1990s, they appear to have taken at least some of their ideology and organizational tactics from two earlier movements: the Minutemen of the 1960s, and the Posse Comitatus of the '70s and '80s. The former was originally intended as a "stay-behind" militia meant to resist a Communist invasion of the United States, before turning into a more militant version of the John Birch Society that proclaimed the Reds to have already taken over the US government. The latter, meanwhile, introduced a radically anti-federalist doctrine that, through a bizarre reading of the common law, denied the legitimacy of the federal and state governments, and also incorporated Christian Identity beliefs.

Going back further, arguments have also been made that the Ku Klux Klan was the first militia group as we would recognize it today,^[7] in the sense that they declared war on the US government in order to end Reconstruction and preserve their idealized way of life. This applies only to the first wave of the Klan, however; later incarnations, while certainly violent, were primarily engaged in political activism rather than armed insurrection. The James-Younger gang (of Jesse James fame), which robbed trains and banks in the Midwest and upper South after the American Civil War, also originated with pro-Confederate "bushwhackers" in Missouri before turning to crime after the war ended, mirroring the antics of more recent gangs like The Order and The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord.

The first wave: the 1990s

The first wave of the modern movement began at a 1992 meeting initiated by fringe preacher Peter J. Peters in Estes Park, Colorado. Peters' meeting was initiated in the wake of the Ruby Ridge fiasco and he invited a large number of leaders from both mainstream evangelical Christian and political extreme right circles; most mainstream Christians blew him off, so the attendance wound up reading like a who's who of the extreme right. Among those in attendance were Richard Butler, leader of the Aryan Nations, Louis Beam, leader of the Texas Ku Klux Klan, Chris Temple, who published the Christian Identity newspaper The Jubilee, and Kirk Lyons, an attorney who has headed an assortment of white supremacist and neo-Confederate legal defense funds.^[8] Last but certainly not least, there was Larry Pratt, founder of the Gun Owners of America and English First, who in 1990 had written a book calling for Americans to form "citizen defense patrols" along the lines of the right-wing fighters in Guatemala and the Philippines — conveniently leaving out that such groups were also known as "death squads" for their brutality.^[9] The purpose of the meeting was to figure out what to do to make sure a Ruby Ridge didn't happen again. Their solution: form citizens' militias.

However, the movement quickly spiraled out of control — and out of the control of the extreme right leaders who initiated it. As with many such movements, the founders talked up the militia concept but then stepped out of the way and went back to what they had been doing before once the ball got rolling. The movement quickly attracted a different set of far-right leaders as a vehicle for their own ends, as well as a smattering of unstables and unknowns who saw the militia movement as a way to make a name for themselves. The government's loosening of shortwave radio regulations in the mid '80s, permitting private religious broadcasters to operate shortwave radio stations, gave the movement a useful outreach tool and propaganda outlet as these broadcasters realized, sometime in the early '90s, that there was money to be made in leasing out airtime to extreme right pundits so crazy that even Rush Limbaugh wouldn't come anywhere near them.^[Note ^3] Many of these hosts emerged as major militia figures in their own right.

The militia movement's strongest period (as monitored by the Anti-Defamation League^[10] and the Southern Poverty Law Center^[4]) was the mid-1990s during the administration of Bill Clinton, and much of its ideological motivation came from perceived injustices perpetuated by governmental authority in cases such as Ruby Ridge and the Waco siege. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 and the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, along with books like John Ross' Unintended Consequences, also motivated conservative gun owners to sign up with such groups, fearing that the government was moving towards the confiscation of personal firearms. In addition, the populist Presidential run of Ross Perot in 1992 and the passage of NAFTA in 1994 motivated angry workers who felt that the government had sold out the middle and working classes to business interests. Lastly, Clinton's sex scandals and the Whitewater investigation created the impression, in the minds of conservative hardliners, that the President was a crook, leading to the proliferation of conspiracy theories accusing Bill and Hillary Clinton of everything up to and including the murder of whistleblowers.

On the more apolitical side, the movement also attracted whackers who took "emergency preparedness" a little too seriously, as well as grown-up little boys and girls who read magazines about mercenaries and needed an excuse to run around in the woods in camo shouting "oo-rah!" without actually having to meet the physical fitness requirements to join the military, or get yelled at by an angry drill instructor on Parris Island. (Couldn't they have just gone hunting instead?) There were also plenty of people caught up in Y2K hysteria who felt that, if they were going to survive the end of industrial civilization, they needed a strong group at their side. However, many of these people quickly left the movement, partly because they had been in it as a fad and had little ideological commitment to its ideals, and partly for reasons that will be described thus.

After Oklahoma City

In the mid-late '90s, the militia movement was at the center of a series of events that caused a wave of publicity both good and bad, bringing the movement to its height but also leading to its undoing. In 1995, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 165 people and injuring over 600. In the ensuing years, militia groups and "lone wolves" with similar ideologies experienced a number of clashes with federal law enforcement, most notably the confrontation with the Montana Freemen in 1996 and the Republic of Texas secessionist group in 1997, as well as the bombing of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics by Eric Robert Rudolph, an anti-abortion and anti-gay extremist who viewed the Olympics as part of the New World Order's plot.

This had two effects. On one hand, right-wingers who hadn't heard of militias before but were sympathetic to the movement's goals joined existing groups or started up their own after hearing that there were folks like them who hated (*ahem*) disfavored a tyrannical Washington and were willing to put their money where their mouth was. On the other hand, many of the casual hangers-on left the movement in droves, perhaps realizing it was a haven for potentially violent, and possibly mentally unstable, political extremists and deciding that they had cold feet and didn't want to be associated with it after all, especially now that law enforcement was paying much closer heed to what they were doing. Moderates poured out of the movement and militants poured in, producing a feedback loop of radicalization that alienated all but the most dedicated.^[2][4] After peaking in 1996 with 858 active groups, the movement went into a steep decline from which it took more than a decade to recover.^[11]

Major (and minor) figures

Mark Koernke,^[12] a janitor at the University of Michigan who called himself "Mark from Michigan". Starting in the early '90s, Mr. from Michigan was giving public speeches, making a series of videos titled America in Peril, and hosting a shortwave radio program called The Intelligence Report spinning outlandish tales of fleets of mysterious black helicopters being prepared for blue-helmeted United Nations troops to invade the US. He maintained close ties with the leaders of the Michigan Militia, then one of the country's largest and most high-profile militia groups, and also started up several groups of his own (though many were little more than talk). He became a focus of public and media attention when a fax he had sent to Texas Congressman Steve Stockman an hour before the Oklahoma City bombing seemed to indicate that he had knowledge of the plan; this later died down once it turned out that the fax's timestamp didn't account for Daylight savings time, meaning that he had sent it just after the bombing occurred and was describing current events. In the early '00s, he served a few years in prison for resisting arrest, assaulting police officers, and leading police on a car chase, but not without claiming that his former boss at the Republic Radio Network had set him up. More fun than being a mere janitor, I guess.
John Trochmann, who had been at the Peters meeting. Trochmann founded the Militia of Montana^[13], one of the first and most high-profile major militia groups. Small in number (largely composed of Trochmann and his family and friends), the MOM sought to promote the militia concept through the magazine Taking Aim and through a mail-order packet of information. The packet included a handbook for how to organize a militia (amusing because, among other things, every page of the booklet had the words TREASON TREASON TREASON TREASON TREASON across the top and bottom margins), a book catalog of the usual conspiracy books and far-right material, and a bunch of photocopies of tanks and military equipment being carried on railroad cars, supposed "evidence" that the United Nations was about to invade the US in the name of the New World Order.^[Note ^4] The MOM didn't engage in paramilitary training like most militias, leading some in the movement to deride them as the "Mail-Order Militia" for being unwilling to take realaction^[4]; however, this meant that they were able to cultivate a friendly media image and avoid getting caught up in the terrorist plots that dragged down so many other groups. Late in the '90s, the MOM was heavily involved in Y2K hysteria, which brought the group to its peak but later wound up crippling their membership and image once it turned out to be nothing. They're still around today, though, peddling conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the financial crisis.^[14]
Indiana attorney Linda Thompson. Formerly a liberal who had done some work for the ACLU, Thompson made a video called Waco, the Big Lie right after the 1993 Waco siege. While not the first significant criticism of the government's mishandling of the events, it made a splash because it was then the most sensational. Thompson soon moved far to the right and went crazy, proclaiming herself "Acting Adjutant General of the Unorganized Militias of the United States", jumping on the "black helicopter" bandwagon, claiming the bar-coded stickers on the backs of highway signs were to guide U.N. tanks after they invaded the U.S. and the Amtrak heavy repair shop at Beech Grove, Indiana is one of the FEMA concentration camps, and proclaiming an armed march on Washington, D.C. scheduled for September 19, 1994 during which "all militia units" were to assemble and arrest the entire U.S. Congress for "treason". She later called off the march (after just about every other militia group balked at her insane proposal) and claimed it had only been to drum up publicity.
Ron Cole, who was so moved by the Branch Davidian siege in 1993 he converted to Branch Davidianism on the spot, and also started two militia groups, the Colorado Light Infantry and the North American Liberation Army. He soon got involved in the feud among surviving Branch Davidians as to who would take over leadership after Koresh's untimely demise. He and the three other members of his Colorado militia were arrested in 1997 over allegations of possession of machine guns.
Robert G. Millar, a Canadian immigrant who had founded a 400-acre compound known as Elohim City in the mountains of eastern Oklahoma in 1973. Elohim City was a popular destination for Christian Identityadherents and other white supremacists, as well as (in one case in 1986) a Canadian woman trying to evade a custody battle. During the '90s, four members of the white supremacist bank robbery gang the Aryan Republican Army lived in Elohim City, and Timothy McVeigh also had some connections to the compound — he had been issued a speeding ticket in the area, and Richard Snell, an Elohim City resident and convicted murderer on death row, threatened that something drastic would happen on the day of his execution. Hours before Snell was executed, the Oklahoma City bombing was carried out.

Decline and dormancy in the early-mid 2000s

Many militia groups and leaders got involved in the hype surrounding the Y2K problem, using the fear surrounding it as a recruiting tool and pushing it as the date of the end times, the New World Order's ultimate takeover, or whatever their big issue was. When Y2K went out with a fizzle rather than a bang, many of the people hyping it up were left with egg on their faces, and those moderate-but-scared followers that hadn't already left the movement over its propensity for violence now saw no reason why they should stay on.^[4]

9/11 was the final nail in the movement's coffin. It split the militias into two camps; while some militia leaders claimed that 9/11 was an inside job, others affirmed their patriotism and offered their support in the waragainst the "Islamofascists". Furthermore, the presidency of George W. Bush and the political dominance of the conservative wing of the Republican Party not only took away the Clintons as easy bogeymen, but it meant that most of the movement's causes, such as illegal immigration, had a more respectable outlet in the form of political activism. This caused the more mainstream (or at least less militant) members to leave and take up support of political efforts to implement their goals, which only further shrank the movement's support to a small hard-core fringe of true believers. By around 2004, the militia movement had completely petered out as an organized political force. A handful of groups and hangers-on kept the idea alive, but for all intents and purposes, they were about as effectual in the '00s as the remaining hippie communes and Black Panthers were in the '80s — a relic of the decade of flannel and the Chicago Bulls that was best left where it belonged.

However, while down for the time being, the embers on the far-right were still very warm. The middle of the decade saw the rise of anti-immigrant "citizen border patrol" groups like the Minuteman Project (no relation to the Minutemen of the '60s), Ranch Rescue, and their many copycats, which grabbed media attention with their armed patrols of the US-Mexico border. The Bush administration's policy in support of immigration reform and Latino outreach, along with 2008 Presidential candidate John McCain's moderate positions on immigration, alienated much of the anti-immigrant right, causing them to grow more radicalized and claim that mainstream conservative politicians had betrayed them in favor of "pandering to the Mexican vote".^{[15][16][Note} ^5]

In addition, the War on Terror and the expansion of the government's police powers in the name of combating terrorism caused many libertarians and paleoconservatives to turn against the Republican Party. Some found common cause with anti-war liberals and left-leaning civil libertarians. Pat Buchanan, for instance, found a new home and a plum job on the left-leaning cable news network MSNBC for several years, where his opposition to the War on Terror and support for a pro-labor, producerist economic policy was, for a time, enough to balance out his reactionary social views, while Ron Paul drew a good chunk of his support in 2008and, to a lesser extent, 2012 from young liberals who weighed his positions in support of civil liberties, an end to the Wars on Terror and Drugs, and criminal justice reform more heavily than his right-libertarian views on most everything else. However, others went off the deep end and delved into the conspiratorial world of the far-right. 9/11 conspiracy theories, while commonly associated with the far left during this time, also counted unquestionable right-wingers like Alex Jones among their greatest proponents, who eagerly updated their New World Order theories to claim that this was the event that would bring about the end of freedom in America.

The second wave: today

The radicalization of nativists and the anti-war right provided the kindling for a rebirth of the militia movement. The sparks came in 2008-09, when the economic crisis, the election of a black Democrat as President, the Tea Party movement, and the proliferation of "red meat" from right-wing blogs, talk radio, and cable news kicked the "Patriot" movement and its rhetoric back into high gear, leading to a second wave of "traditional" anti-government militias.^[17] Two groups at the forefront of the new movement, the Oath Keepers and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, specifically recruit law enforcement and (in the Oath Keepers' case) military personnel in the interests of "upholding the Constitution", with the Oath Keepers' list of ten "orders we will not obey" including two references to concentration/detention camps, one to the seizure of civilians' personal firearms, and one to foreign troops on US soil, all major bogeymen of the "Patriot" right, though the Oath Keepers in particular advocate bare noncompliance rather than direct resistance to such orders.^[18] Meanwhile, many of the old anti-government plots are once again coming out of the woodwork.^[19][20]

Analogues outside the US

Central Europe

In the aftermath of World War I, the Freikorps paramilitary groups in Germany and German-speaking lands can be seen as having been a European analogue/antecedent to the American militia movement in both actions and ideology. They engaged in violence against communists and Slavic peoples who they saw as having stabbed Germany in the back, the latter in particular in those areas of the Baltic states and Poland with large German minorities. In addition, just like American militias that claim descent from the "minutemen" of the Revolutionary War, the Freikorps had a founding myth in the militias that waged guerrilla war against the French during the Napoleonic Wars. Many Freikorps leaders went on to become high-ranking members of the notorious Schutzstaffel, or SS, though many also opposed the Nazis and were purged in the Night of the Long Knives.

The Heimwehr (Home Guard) in Austria were a similar movement, but instead of the pan-German ideology of the Nazis, they espoused a uniquely Austrian brand of fascism that was more similar to the original article in Italy. So-called "Austrofascism" was more rooted in Catholicism and not explicitly anti-Semitic (even sponsoring Jewish artists and welcoming Jewish refugees from the Nazis). More importantly, they staunchly opposed joining Germany and engaged in cultural posturing regarding Austria being the "true" or "better" Germany, and they often got into violent fights with the Austrian Nazi Party as a result. The Heimwehr were incorporated into the Fatherland Front's paramilitary arm in 1934 after the party rose to power in Austria.

Interestingly, the Nazis themselves tried to create one of these once they knew their rule over Germany was doomed, in the form of a "stay-behind" militia known as Werwolf that was meant to oppose Allied occupation. However, they seem to have been a very poorly organized group indeed, as their only significant activity seemed to be right-wing graffiti.

South Africa

In the 19th century, the Boer republics, unable to afford standing armies, relied on a militia system as their means of national defense. Adult male citizens were organized into "commando" units that were attached to the town they were raised from (e.g. the Bloemfontein Commando), and were structured democratically, with all officers appointed by the commando as opposed to the government. The soldiers' training was informal and came mostly from their experience as farmers and especially hunters, favoring stealth, cover, marksmanship, and long-range attacks as opposed to the traditional army formations and tactics of the late 19th century.^[21]

While this system was effective at holding off tribal raids, it was of limited use when it was put up against an organized, imperial invader in the form of the British Empire. The First Boer War in 1880-81 showed off the commando system's strengths, as it was basically a series of skirmishes that the Boers won handily (albeit mostly due to British incompetence). However, the Second Boer War, which ran from 1899 to 1902, was a far greater engagement. Even though the war exposed critical weaknesses in the British Army (and caused the word "commando" to enter the English language to describe an all-around badass, lone-wolf fighter), the Boer commandos were still only able to hold out for two and a half years, and failed to stop the total conquest of the Boer republics as British colonies. Their battlefield prowess was no match for either the vast resources of the Empire or the brutality that the British employed against the Boer civilian population that supported them, which included scorched-earth tactics against Boer farms and herding the dispossessed Boer families into concentration camps (the war helped to popularize the term, even).^[22]

Later on, in the '80s and early '90s, groups like the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) and the Afrikaner Volksfront (AVF) engaged in violence against anti-apartheid politicians as the apartheid system began to lose popular support and international pressure mounted against South Africa. The AWB declared war on the government once it entered negotiations to end the apartheid system, and on June 25, 1993, they led an attempt to storm the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park near Johannesburg, where the negotiations were being held.

Japan

Nowadays, the uyoku dantai are best known for their gaisensha, vans and trucks plastered with propaganda and armed with loudspeakers blaring "patriotic" slogans and speeches/rants to anyone within earshot^[23], as well as their denial of Japanese war crimes during WWII and their support for historical revisionism in school textbooks. Due to Japan's strict gun control laws, they aren't armed to nearly the same degree as their American counterparts, leaving them with their gaisensha as weapons of mass irritation. Ironically, many ethnic Koreans are affiliated with uyoku dantai groups, mainly because of the links that many such groups have with yakuza crime syndicates (which include disproportionate numbers of Koreans).Japan's closest analogue to the militia movement would be the ultra-nationalist uyoku dantai groups. Like the German Freikorps, the uyoku dantai engaged in right-wing terrorism, directed mainly against socialists, labor unions, Koreans and other perceived threats to the Emperor's authority. Unlike the Freikorps, however, such groups did not disappear after World War II; instead, the US co-opted them in the fight against socialism in post-war Japan. This began to change in the '70s and especially at the end of the Cold War, with growing numbers of nationalists viewing the US as an occupying force that was as great a threat to Japanese sovereignty and culture as the Red Menace.*

In a separate but related instance, there was the case of the Tatenokai (Shield Society), a right-wing militia formed in 1968 by celebrated author, playwright, model, and actor Yukio Mishima and composed of his young male acolytes. In 1970, Mishima and four members of the Tatenokai were able to enter the Tokyo headquarters of the Japanese Self-Defense Force's Eastern Command and take the regional commandant hostage. The Tatenokai barricaded themselves in the commandant's office, allowing Mishima to use the balcony to to read his manifesto to the soldiers gathered below, hoping to inspire a coup d'état that would restore the Emperor's power and re-establish the imperial cult (both de-legitimized by Japan's WWII surrender treaty). The soldiers, more irritated than anything, simply laughed and shouted insults. Following his speech, Mishima and one of his followers (believed to be Mishima's lover) committed seppuku. The coup attempt is known as the Mishima jiken (Mishima incident).^[24]

Canada

Despite Canada having strict laws banning unsanctioned paramilitary groups, American-style militias have cropped up in Canada (Alberta especially), animated largely by hatred of antifa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and, above all else, Muslims. Ironically, the largest militia in Canada is the local branch of the Three Percenter movement, which is, as noted above, rooted in American nationalist mythmaking surrounding the Revolution — a war in which the territories that later became Canada remained loyal to Britain and afterwards became a refuge for pro-British loyalists fleeing the newly-formed United States. Canadian gun laws mean that, while they do show up at protests dressed in camo and tactical gear, they do so carrying stun rods, billy clubs, and even canes instead of the guns that they have to keep locked up at home.^[25][26]

External links

ADL militia watchdog archives (site put on ice in 2000)
ADL paper on the revival of the militia movement
The militias' YouTube strategy. Includes seven embedded videos.
Domestic Sources of Terrorism, Michael J. Whidden
Militias: Initiating Contact, an FBI guide to dealing with militia members (just in case).

Notes

:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ *"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Generally interpreted by others to mean bodies such as the National Guard and state police, assembled and regulated by the states or the Feds, and interpreted by them to mean an individual right to bear arms and form private paramilitary groups.*
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Something that's not without precedent. After all, Huey Newton's original Black Panther Party for Self-Defense could be described as a "Black Power" version of the NRA due to their strong support for gun rights (especially with regards to defending against police brutality), and their actions against drug dealers and street gangs seem to imply that they took the "militia" part seriously.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Sean Hannity, on the other hand, was more than happy to cozy up with neo-Nazi ideologue Hal Turner until it became inconvenient to his rising career.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Rail is the default way to transport military cargo (especially tanks) overland, since they weigh far too much to transport by air or truck. However, it is a huge leap of logic to claim that this means that America is about to be invaded.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ A tradition that they apparently forget goes back to Ronald Reagan, who passed the first "amnesty" bill in 1986 and remarked during his 1980 campaign that "Latinos are Republicans... [who] just don't know it yet."

References

:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Christian Research Institute — The Patriot Movement
↑ ^Jump ^up ^to:2.0 ^2.1 ^2.2 A primer on the militia movement by the Anti-Defamation League, intended for law enforcement.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ "'Alt-Right' Declares Flame War On Oath Keepers." *Southern Poverty Law Center, 15 June 2017 (recovered 17 June 2017).*
↑ ^Jump ^up ^to:4.0 ^4.1 ^4.2 ^4.3 ^4.4 "Once popular Patriot leader John Trochmann now leads 'Mail-Order Militia'." *Intelligence Report, Summer 2001 (recovered 7 July 2017).*
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Kimmel, Michael. "America's angriest white men: Up close with racism, rage, and Southern supremacy."Salon, 17 November 2013.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Mencimer, Stephanie. "Meet the Former Militiaman Behind the Fast and Furious Scandal." *Mother Jones, 14 December 2011 (recovered 30 April 2019).*
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ "What Is the Militia Movement?" *PublicEye.org*
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Southern Poverty Law Center's profile on Kirk Lyons
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ "False Patriots." *Intelligence Report, Summer 2001, Issue 201.*
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/Militia_M.asp?xpicked=4&item=19
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ "Militias 'in retreat'." *BBC News, 11 May 2001.*
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Anti-Defamation League profile: Mark Koernke
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Militia of Montana
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Yes, they have a site.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ McCain frequently earned the nickname "Juan McCain" from anti-immigrant activists, as evidenced by this screed.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Dwyer, Mark Andrew. "Election Year Sellout."
*:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/willl-ex-military-patriots-form-more*
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ "The Second Wave: Return of the Militias." Southern Poverty Law Center, August 2009.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ "US 'Christian militants' charged after FBI raids." *BBC News, 30 March 2010.*
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ "Georgia men arrested over alleged US ricin plot." *The Guardian, 2 November 2011.*
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ "Boer Commandos." *Ladysmith History & the Boer War.*
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ "Concentration Camps." The Anglo-Boer War Museum.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Much to the dismay of many non-right-wing Japanese, who apparently find this more annoying than anything, though few are actually willing to tell them to cut it out.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ The excellent 1985 film *Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters dramatizes autobiographical excerpts from his novels and accurately recreates the coup attempt.*
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Lamoureux, Mack. "Inside Canada's Armed, Anti-Islamic 'Patriot' Group." *Vice, 14 June 2017 (recovered 30 April 2019).*
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Hutter, Kristy. "Three Percenters are Canada's 'most dangerous' extremist group, say some experts."CBC.ca, 10 May 2018 (recovered 30 April 2019).

Categories:

===

MILITIA 2

A solid survey

The fringe moving into the mainstream

Broader support

===

'Tacit endorsement': The Proud Boys are celebrating Trump telling them to 'stand by'

Violent Pro-Trump Militias

Related

Armed Vigilantes Antagonizing Protesters Have Received a Warm Reception From Police

A Surge of Far-Right Extremism

Related

Trump Supporters Rush to Defend One of Their Own Who Killed Protesters in Kenosha

DHS Takes to the Streets

Two Defendants Charged with Murder and Aiding and Abetting in Slaying of Federal Protective Service Officer at Oakland Courthouse Building

Well regulated?

Legality of militias

Antecedents

The first wave: the 1990s

After Oklahoma City

Major (and minor) figures

Decline and dormancy in the early-mid 2000s

The second wave: today

Analogues outside the US

Central Europe

South Africa

Japan

Canada

See also

External links

Notes

References