active duty militia

1 25 do we need sep cat for vets? jan NOLA and las vegas

see usmc

see infiltration

SEE CIVIL WAR TRUMP FASCISM MILITARIZATION POSSE COMM MARTIAL LAW

see radicalization

// cops? kyle R $

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tuberville i call them Am

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6 25 FT BRAGG TRUMP GETS ACTIVE DUTY TO BOO la ca GOV

FOX ON BASE?

SNOPES

Since at least early 2022, social media users have claimed that Fox News is the default or one of the default television stations on U.S. military bases.

The Lincoln Project, a conservative political action committee critical of U.S. President Donald Trump, made the claim in a Feb. 25, 2022, X post that amassed more than 51,000 likes. The group also started a petition called "Ban Fox on Base," which as of this writing had received more than 35,000 signatures. On the petition's webpage, the organization claimed that Fox News is "one of the default stations on all U.S. military bases."

IFrame Content

Similar claims have appeared on Facebook, Bluesky and Threads, while posts on Quora, a Q&A site, asking about Fox News on military bases span years. Snopes readers have also written in since February 2022 to ask if Fox News was the default or "only" station available on military bases both on land and at sea. In early 2025, Trump nominated former Fox News host Pete Hegseth to run the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), leading some social media users to bring up the claim again.

Speaking via email, an unnamed Pentagon spokesperson directed our inquiries about the rumor to the branches of the military (which the DOD oversees). While the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force did not return a request to confirm or deny the claim, the U.S. Marines and U.S. Army both said the two agencies do not direct or mandate viewership of any specific news channel. Therefore, this indicates that Fox News is not the default or official channel on military bases; however, until the Navy and Air Force provide comments, it is not possible to rate this claim.

The Lincoln Project did not return a request for more information on how it determined that Fox News was a default television station on U.S. military bases.

History of claim

A year after the Lincoln Project's 2022 post and petition, VoteVets, a "progressive veterans" advocacy group, launched its own to ban the conservative news station on military bases. VoteVets' March 2023 advertisement did not explicitly claim that Fox News was a default station on military bases, but it did quote an anonymous former Marine who reportedly said that "if you walk the Pentagon halls there will be not one TV tuned to anything but Fox."

The ad attributed this quote to a Feb. 10, 2021, article from "progressive" news outlet Common Dreams. However, VoteVets appeared to get the publication date wrong, as the only Common Dreams article featuring this quote was an Op-Ed (archived) published on Feb. 10, 2022, titled: "It's Time the Pentagon Pulled the Plug on Fox News." The full paragraph featuring the quote reads:

As to the seriousness of the problem, a former Marine has told the authors: "Right-wing society has captured the military . . . If you walk the Pentagon halls there will be not one TV tuned to anything but Fox." Another source told us that at their Air Force facility, Fox News is always blaring in common spaces during duty hours. Far from always being a service member's choice, the situation is often as at an airport lounge, where everyone is subjected to it like it or not.

VoteVets has not yet provided Snopes with a public comment.

Statements provided by the Army and Marines contradicted the assertion above from the Common Dreams article, instead framing what was on the television as being a choice made by individual service members. "There is no Army directive mandating the viewing of any specific news channel nor are there default channels," the Army wrote via its press inbox email in a response with no specific attribution.

Similarly, Joshua C. Benson, a spokesperson for the Marines, said via email that the military branch's televisions "have a range of media programming options from local, national, and international agencies with the ability to change the channel at will."

"Across the Marine Corps, a multitude of contracts exist with providers to supply bases and units with cable television," Benson wrote. "Individual commands aboard installations have the ability to purchase cable contracts on their own, with their own budgets. Members of base housing are free to purchase individual accounts with local providers as they see fit."

Benson said he checked with "many outstations around the Marine Corps to figure out how each one does the contracting for television services" in order to arrive at the information he provided in his emailed response.

US military and Fox News

While the military branches that responded may not require or set a default television station, it is likely that Fox News often plays on U.S. military bases across the world. Fox dominates the cable news industry; in fact, according to a report from AdWeek using Nielsen Media Research data, the network has been the most-watched for more than two decades. Likewise, according to a Fox News article also based on Nielsen's data, the station averaged 2.2 million total day views on weekdays and took the top spot during prime-time hours.

Active-duty military members are expressly prohibited from engaging in partisan political activity, which may explain why there are no legitimate surveys of their political leanings. However, surveys of veterans by Gallup and Pew Research found that veterans have long been more likely to lean Republican. In 2024, a Pew Research survey found that 61% of military veterans backed Trump.

It is also worth noting that the VoteVets advertisement cited the George Washington University Program on Extremism database to claim that one in seven of the people (roughly 14%) charged over the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol had U.S. military backgrounds. However, as of this writing, that number is actually 16.2%, or closer to one in six, according to updated data released in 2024 by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, at the University of Maryland.

Given Fox News' popularity among Republicans — as well as reports that the television station's work amplified Trump's election-fraud theories that motivated many Jan. 6 participants to riot — it is not surprising that personnel stationed at military bases may choose to tune into Fox News when given the option, even if it is not the default station on military bases.

Snopes reached out to various veterans' organizations asking if they could connect us with anyone currently or formerly in the military who would publicly speak to how often they see Fox News playing on military bases. Some organizations declined our request and we await responses from others.

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an 1 25

This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wake up call,” reads a line in written notes authorities made public last week from Matthew Livelsberger, the driver of the Cybertruck who killed himself in the vehicle shortly before it exploded in front of a Trump hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day.

The combat veteran’s writings include poignant passages, as when he expressed the need to “cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.”

But Livelsberger also expresses warmed-over manosphere tropes and anti-Democratic clichés from the Republican 2024 campaign.

“Masculinity is good and men must be leaders.”

“Thankfully we rejected the DEI candidate and will have a real President instead of Weekend at Bernie’s.”

“Rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans!”

Those sound pretty much like rote red meat talking points slung around by JD Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Steve Bannon, or whichever Trumpworld podcaster might be trending at any given time.

But other lines in Livelsberger’s notes invoke something less banal, and more violent, envisioning what reads like a January 6 style attack on the nation’s institutions, but on steroids.

“Military and vets move on DC starting now. Militias facilitate and augment this activity.”*

“Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of thousands.”*

“Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete.”*

“Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.”*

Briefing reporters last week after Livelsberger’s life ended in a rented Tesla in front of a Trump hotel, law enforcement officials said Livelsberger appeared to have “no animosity” toward Donald Trump.

While delivering that briefing, Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill and FBI Special Agent in Charge Spencer Evans knew that not only did Livelsberger have no animosity toward Trump, but in fact was cheering on Trump, and Trumpism.

McMahill and Evans left that part out, along with Livelsberger’s calls for uprooting people he didn’t agree with from the government and the military “by any means necessary.”

Law enforcement officials weren’t the only ones glossing over the story.

Media reports on Livelsberger, in Nevada and nationally, have downplayed his Trump-friendly extremism, when they’ve mentioned it at all.

When law enforcement officials suggested the Cybertruck driver hadn’t indicated any malice toward Trump (and when they knew but neglected to mention the driver was actually a Trump fan), it seemed a relevant observation at the time, lest the motive for blowing up a truck made and sold by Trump’s right-hand billionaire Elon Musk in front of a hotel with Trump’s name on it might be seen as a statement of disapproval of both men.

Livelsberger’s action clearly wasn’t that. It might have been an homage to them though.

This week law enforcement provided more passages Livelsberger wrote in in the days leading up to the explosion, which show Livelsberger used ChatGPT to learn how to turn a Cybertruck into a garbage fire, was convinced he was being tailed on his way to Las Vegas, and had intended to carry out his plan at the Grand Canyon Skywalk.

And in one of the quotes authorities released, Livelsberger wrote: “As much as the MSM will paint me out to be some terrorist and monster, I had no intent on taking out anyone but myself if that happens. I am deeply sorry to anyone that gets hurt.”

It didn’t go exactly as Livelsberger intended. Seven people were hurt. Blessedly, their injuries were minor.

And the MSM — the mainstream media — did not paint him out to be some terrorist or monster.

Perhaps had bystanders been seriously injured or killed, the media would be paying more attention to the fact that whatever other things were going on with Livelsberger, one of those things was the radicalization of a Trump sympathizer into a violent extremist.

But as if taking its cue from McMahill and Evans, the media coverage has mostly left that part out.

Well, there have been other salacious or compelling storylines to focus on: a Cybertruck exploding in front of a Trump hotel; “very strange similarities” between Livelsberger and Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who killed New Orleans revelers with a truck earlier on New Year’s Day; the prospect of AI’s new role as an instruction guide for DIY explosive devices; and, of course, the tragedy of a hero’s fall.

Livelsberger left behind statements calling for an armed, violent assault on the nation’s most important public institutions, to be carried out by people of whom he approved. He called for a “purge” of people of whom he disapproved from the nation’s institutions “by any means necessary.” And, according to his journaling, he envisioned it all as a triumphant ride on the “Trump, Musk, Kennedy…wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans!”

And we’ve reached the point where the vast majority of the media doesn’t regard that as a particularly important part of the story, if they mention it at all.

Maybe the media hasn’t taken Livelsberger’s political extremism seriously because it happened in a place the media (and the nation) has a habit of not taking very seriously. Bizarre thing happens in Las Vegas, must be a day that ends in a y, etc. In which case Livelsberger’s hope that Las Vegas would be a prime location to place a wake up call was a miscalculation.

Or with everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to members of Congress from both parties to all the billionaires to pockets of the media surrendering in advance to Trump, maybe wake up calls are just passé anymore.

Portions of this column were originally published in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free and which you can subscribe to here.*

Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com.

vets doku

Against All Enemies – FULL MOVIE

MeidasTouch

Aug 5, 2024

448,671 views • Premiered Aug 5, 2024

Why would US military veterans take up arms against the country they swore an oath to protect? Through gripping personal perspectives from all sides of this ongoing crisis, Against All Enemies goes deep inside the violent extremist movement in America, alongside the Proud Boys, 3 Percenters, and with never-before-seen footage of the Oath Keepers. These groups, organized and led by highly trained military veterans, pose one of the greatest threats to the United States today. While most veterans are successful in their transition to civilian life, an increasingly radicalized element is drawn to the insurrectionist movement. We saw evidence of this during the January 6 Capitol riots, but the danger goes far beyond a single day. The film explores the historical roots of the insurrectionist cause, its conspiracy fueled draw for today's veterans, and the top-cover coming from powerful politicians and highly decorated former military officers. Against All Enemies is a warning about an existential threat to democracy and a beacon for those hoping to combat it.

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AN 1 25

The United States' 2024 presidential race will go down in history as incredibly polarizing.

Vice President Kamala Harris led a diverse coalition that ranged from liberals and progressives to centrist Blue Dog Democrat to right-wing Never Trump conservatives, and many of her supporters on both the left and the right slammed Donald Trump as dangerously authoritarian and a threat to democracy. But it wasn't enough to get Harris past the finish line, and President-elect Trump defeated her by roughly 1.5 percent in the popular vote while picking up 312 electoral votes (according to the Cook Political Report).

Christian nationalists and white fundamentalist evangelicals have been celebrating Trump's victory, which they view as a major triumph for their agenda. And they aren’t the only ones on the far right who are feeling emboldened by Trump's return to the White House.

In an article published on January 6, 2025 — four years after the violent 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building and 14 days before Trump's second inauguration — The New Republic's Spencer Sunshine details the enthusiasm that white nationalists and neo-Nazis are feeling.

"Active clubs — white supremacist MMA training gyms — are in full flourish, and have even expanded overseas," Sunshine reports. "While they've had limited public activism, observers worry they could soon transform into a fully-fledged fighting force. A new wave of swastika-waving neo-Nazis has emerged, too. The media-friendly Blood Tribe, who use striking aesthetics and a confrontational approach, were early promoters of the pet-eating rumor."

Sunshine adds, "A Columbus, Ohio march by their splinter group Hate Club 1488 grabbed so much attention that even President Biden denounced it."

According to Sunshine, Blood Tribe — along with Patriot Front and the antisemitic Goyim Defense League — "represent a new, flourishing neo-Nazi movement — one that will likely continue to grow during Trump's second term."

Trump has vowed to pardon the January 6, 2021 rioters, and he hasn't ruled out the possibility of pardoning those who were charged with violent offenses.

Sunshine warns that these pardons could encourage far-right groups to engage in acts of violence, from militia groups to white nationalists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

"Pardons for the leaders of violent groups, such as the Proud Boys' (Enrique) Tarrio, will undoubtedly result in their group's revival," Sunshine predicts. "It will also signal Trump's approval of street violence, potentially reviving the mass street brawls with antifascists during Trump's first term, such as those seen in Portland, Oregon."

Sunshine continues, "As far-right grassroots remain mobilized, the next four years will likely be an environment where far right individuals and groups can be fully activated and function as Trump's foot soldiers — legally or otherwise."

READ MORE:[January 6 rioters are 'political dissidents' declares spouse of Trump Cabinet nominee

*Read Spencer Sunshine's full article for The New Republic at this link.

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AN GUK 1 25

Some supporters of the Oath Keepers have vehemently denied that there is anything racist about the far-right militia group, insisting that non-whites are welcome as members.

But according to The Guardian's Jason Wilson, Robert Kinch — leader of an Oath Keepers spinoff group called Oath Keepers USA — has called for a "race war." And Kinch, a former Las Vegas homicide detective, has maintained his ties to law enforcement, Wilson reports.

In an article published on January 6, 2024 — the fourth anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol Building — Wilson explains, "The revelations about Robert 'Bobby' Kinch, now of Duck Creek, Utah, come from public records, online materials and the work of a longtime infiltrator of the patriot movement in the Pacific Northwest, who provided vital evidence to the Guardian captured inside Kinch's home. The findings show that four years on from January 6, the Oath Keepers, who played a central role in fomenting that day's insurrection in Washington, have not disappeared, but have continued quietly adding law-enforcement officers to their ranks."

Wilson warns that President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House "may encourage the likes of Kinch to bring their movement back into the spotlight, as the incoming administration promises to carry out unprecedented mass deportation of immigrants and to take on Trump's perceived opponents, whom he has described as 'the enemy within.'"

Wilson doesn't mention the infiltrator by name, citing "fears of retaliation." But the Guardian reporter notes that the person "spent several years from 2021 in contact with multiple, interconnected and overlapping anti-government 'patriot movement' groups in the Pacific Northwest and Intermountain West."

Wilson reports, "Their trove of archived materials includes chat logs, documents and media files, and has been made available to the Guardian and other news organizations by the whistleblower and pro-transparency non-profit, Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOSecrets). The materials also include first-hand photographs and recordings of direct interactions with anti-government leaders who believed that the infiltrator was a like-minded activist, and who accepted them into their inner circles."

Heidi Beirich of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) told The Guardian, "These disclosures show once again how police departments aren't taking the threat of extremists in the ranks seriously."

{===}:

11/22/2024

Kyle Mantyla

Kristen Holmes @ CNN: Matt Gaetz says he’s not returning to Congress next year

Former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who withdrew from consideration as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general on Thursday, said Friday he will not be returning to Congress next year.

Charisma Madarang @ Rolling Stone: Trump Taps Pam Bondi, His Impeachment Lawyer, for Attorney General

The news arrives on the same day Trump's former AG pick Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration.

Hunter Walker @ Talking Points Memo: Hegseth Railed Against ‘Insidious’ Security Measures That Kept Far-Right Extremists Out Of Armed Forces

Pete Hegseth is mad. The former weekend Fox News host and Army National Guard veteran who President-elect Donald Trump tapped to lead the Department of Defense has made blasting the states of the American educational system and armed forces a cornerstone of his brand. And one of the things that has him most worked up is measures that the military’s leadership have taken in recent years to weed out far-right extremists from their ranks.

Christopher Mathias @ HuffPost: Trump’s ‘Border Czar’ Pick Has Been Auditioning For The Role On Extremist Media Platforms

The man President-elect Donald Trump would go on to tap as his “border czar” spent the last several years making appearances on some of the most extreme right-wing media outlets in the country — including a program hosted by an Adolf Hitler-admiring QAnon conspiracist — and promising to implement a brutal regime of mass deportations if Trump returns to the White House.

Caiwei Chen @ The Daily Dot: Rumble teases ‘big creator’ as rumors fly Adin Ross will join site, live stream with Trump from the White House

Streamer Adin Ross appears to be leveling up his partnership with President-elect Donald Trump. The online personality announced that he’ll be hosting a second interview with the president-elect—this time live from the White House after Trump takes office.

Angry White Men: Wesley Todd: In A ‘Christian Nation’ There Will Be ‘No More Mosques, No More Synagogues’

In a Nov. 20, 2024 livestream for Right Response Ministries, Christian nationalist Wesley Todd claimed that the United States, if it becomes a “Christian nation,” will enact policies that will drive out non-Christians. This includes banning houses of worship, like mosques and synagogues, and publicly executing “pornographers.”

David Badash @ The New Civil Rights Movement: ‘One of the Smallest Margins Since the 19th Century’: NYT Crushes Trump’s ‘Landslide’ Claim

Donald Trump, his team, his allies, and his supporters in the right-wing media have been calling his presidential win “historic,” and a “landslide,” while using those provably false claims to declare a mandate. The voting from the election earlier this month is still not complete but Trump’s slim margin of victory is likely to shrink even further.

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an 12 23

one of the hazards of participating in racially motivated extremist activity is getting banned from U.S. military facilities — as David Fair can attest.

Fair is no longer “allowed to enter military bases,” according to a disclosure he made during chat sessions on the encrypted messaging app Telegram that caters to racist skinheads in the United States and Europe.

“I honestly don’t know if it’s the fact that I’m the leader of a white nationalist group or January 6th involvement,” Fair elaborated in a voice chat posted in the channel, which Raw Story has reviewed. “Trying to figure it out myself. I don’t know what to tell my boss. Which one’s worse?”

ALSO READ:Nazis bullied a conservative Tennessee town. Locals punched back. Trump should be worried.

Fair did not respond to emails requesting comment for this story. It is not clear how he learned about the ban or what type of work he does that might require him to visit military bases. He lives near Fort Jackson, a military installation near Columbia, S.C., that provides basic training to more than 45,000 soldiers entering the Army each year.

The Department of Defense did not respond to inquiries from Raw Story about why Fair, who is not a member of the military, was banned from military bases.

Fair leads the South Carolina-based Southern Sons Active Club, which is part of the burgeoning network of neo-Nazi groups that emphasize brotherhood and mixed-martial arts training. These “active clubs” also work to indoctrinate young men in the white supremacist conspiracy theory that white people are facing genocide.

Southern Sons Active Club also has a presence in North Carolina and Georgia.

Most of these active clubs outwardly present a more sanitized version of white nationalism by generally refraining from overt displays of Nazi symbolism, such as the swastika. They also have worked alongside the Proud Boys — a group with complicated racial politics that accepts men of color while also harboring members who embrace Nazism — and harassed drag shows and other LGBTQ events.

Fair’s group is less guarded than others in its ideological signaling: Photos distributed on its public channel on the encrypted messaging app Telegram show members giving Hitler salutes.

Beyond his involvement in the active club network, part of the so-called “white nationalism 3.0 model,” Fair is a self-avowed fan of racist skinhead culture, a throwback to the 1980s and 1990s, before the 19-year-old man was born.

ALSO READ:Trump’s voice is hawking ‘gold bars’ on YouTube. But is it really Trump?

Fair’s presence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 is not a secret, but there’s no evidence that he violated any laws beyond being on restricted Capitol grounds — an offense that the Department of Justice typically does not prosecute, with some rare exceptions.

Regardless of whether Fair’s presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 played a role in his getting banned from military bases, discussion of Fair’s situation among members of the Telegram chat indicates that it was a relatable predicament for other extremists.

For example, Vassilios Pistolis, a white supremacist who was formerly active with the now-defunct Traditionalist Worker Party and Atomwaffen, disclosed in the chat that he has been banned from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Pistolis was court-martialed and ultimately discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps for assaulting antiracist counter-protestors at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va.

Non-military civilians typically have access to military bases for a range of activities including contract work and services such as deliveries and heating and air-conditioning maintenance.

The military has been slow to take action against active-duty members charged with criminal offenses for their participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection. But the Tennessee Valley Authority — a federally owned utility — banned William Beals, a union carpenter, from its facilities after learning he was present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, as exclusively reported by Raw Story.

More than two years later, the FBI arrested him and charged him with theft of U.S. property, as well as violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.

Tyler Dykes, a Marine Corps veteran who was briefly involved with the Southern Sons Active Club earlier this year, was arrested in July and charged with assaulting law enforcement and other alleged violations related to the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

IFrame Content

*David Fair appears in the top row, second from left, in a composite photo published by Atlanta Antifascists.

Prior to his arrest by the FBI, Dykes served time in jail for crimes related to his participation in a torch march on the eve of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va.

It is not clear whether Dykes and Fair knew each other on Jan. 6, but no evidence has surfaced that Fair was with Dykes that day.

Instead, Fair walked to the Capitol with his mother, Christina Praser-Fair, according to an account she gave to WLTX News 19. “We got to the Capitol building, there was already a ton of people there,” Praser-Fair told the news station. “We were right next to the scaffolding.”

A photo included in the news report shows Fair wearing a red Trump 2020 hat and dental braces, while holding a Vietnamese American Freedom and Heritage flag and standing in front of the risers erected on the west side of the Capitol for Joe Biden’s inauguration.

A local news story shows Fair with his family at then-President Donald Trump’s January 2017 inauguration, giving his age as 12 at that time. He recently announced that he was celebrating his birthday on Telegram. Based on that metric, he would have been 16 at the time of the insurrection, and 17 when he helped found Southern Sons Active Club in the summer of 2022.

‘Act the fascist part’

During an interview with a white nationalist podcaster in January, Fair pitched an approach to talking about white power ideology to friends and neighbors — one he asserted would avoid tripping alarm bells.

“If you’re talking to a person, politics comes, up you don’t need to say, ‘Oh yeah, I’m a national socialist, like you know, Hitler from Germany,’” he said. “I would just tell people, ‘Yeah, I’m a nationalist. I love my nation. I love the people in it. And I’m proud to be who I am.’ And nobody on Earth — even non-white people — they won’t get mad at hearing that.”

But to the podcast audience, he made no effort to conceal who he was.

“Act the fascist part,” Fair urged. “Don’t just say you’re a fascist. Become a fascist. Or national socialist, or pro-white, identitarian, whatever you consider yourself to be — act the part.”

Fair has evangelized for his racist beliefs off-line, too.

For example, Southern Sons Active Club has actively networked with other far-right groups.

ALSO READ:Big money for top Democrat stolen: federal records

They joined forces with the Proud Boys to protest the drag show in Florence, S.C., in September 2022.

They appeared at a flash rally outside the headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., with Tennessee Active Club, which is led by Sean Kauffmann, who recently garnered notoriety for attaching himself to the mayoral candidate Gabrielle Hanson in Franklin, Tenn.

And members of Southern Sons Active Club collaborated with the neo-fascist group Patriot Front on stickering runs and hand-to-hand combat training, according to their Telegram channel.

Southern Sons Active Club allows its members to join other white power groups, Fair said in the podcast interview.

“You can join any group you want because this is your brotherhood, this is your family, and if you want to do the national thing, go ahead,” he said. “We’re still your brothers.” He added only one caveat: “You can get in touch with any other guy as long as it’s not some terrorist group, you know.”

But Fair’s efforts to distance Southern Sons Active Club from terrorism is belied by a message on the group’s Telegram channel recommending that followers “read the 88 precepts of David Lane.”

Lane was a member of the neo-Nazi terrorist group the Order who authored the seminal text of the modern white power movement while serving a 190-year prison sentence for his role in the 1984 murder of Jewish talk-radio host Alan Berg.

ALSO READ:George Santos’ potential replacement also has financial ethics issues

Beyond pushing fitness and self-improvement, the Southern Sons Active Club channel salts in messaging with an aggressive edge, with phrases such as, “Mark your territory,” “We win by dominating physical space,” and, “Total victory or total death.”

While Southern Sons Active Club has been relatively dormant over the past eight months since its members were exposed in the Atlanta Antifa report, Fair has been talking about reviving the group.

In a message posted on the Telegram chat frequented by racist skinheads, Fair said he is “planning on traveling the entire Carolinas and Georgia on a grand tour of sorts meeting with our guys to build up more support.”

He specifically mentioned interest in convening an in-person meeting of Southern Sons Active Club members and other white supremacists in Charlotte, N.C., although he appears to have not settled on a date. Last weekend, he joined a friend in Atlanta and pledged to put up Southern Sons Active Club stickers.

In his posts on the Telegram chat for racist skinheads, Fair is open about his abuse of alcohol, and in one recent post he wrote, “Literally me,” in reaction to a meme about drinking and driving. And he presents himself as someone willing to confront people he views as his adversaries, writing in one message that he has “troll”-ed Radical Hebrew Israelites, an antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ group whose membership is predominantly Black.

The day before Fair announced that he had been banned from military bases, he said he planned to go to his local Waffle House and harass a trangender employee.

“I’m thinking maybe like just harassing the f---ing t----- or making a big scene out of it,” he said. “I don’t know. I got like five dudes on board with me, so we can probably do something funny if y’all can think of something.”

Last month, he announced in the chat at 10:14 p.m. on the Saturday after Thanksgiving that he was at Waffle House on “hour something of being drunk,” and said he was “tempted” to start a fight. More than four hours later, he announced that he “got home safe” and was “Booz cruising again.”

Fair posted a video of himself driving that referenced getting “socked in the jaw,” but it’s not clear exactly what happened during his visit to Waffle House, although he appears to have avoided any entanglements with law enforcement.

Commenting on a former Southern Sons Active Club member who apparently failed to demonstrate sufficient mettle, Fair reflected on the qualities he values in his fellow white supremacists.

“Honestly, at the current state of our scene it almost takes a criminal mind to keep going sometimes,” he said. “I don’t say criminal mind to say we are dangerous lads. But it takes a certain mindset — an ability to be ready to do anything.”

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/anatomy-smear-campaign-how-right-wing-media-neutralized-pentagon-effort-address-white

no lnx vids

Anatomy of a smear campaign: How right-wing media neutralized a Pentagon effort to address white supremacy in the military

Right-wing media smeared the Pentagon official mitigating white supremacy in the military. Now his unit has been abandoned.

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 05/25/23

Right-wing media outlets and personalities leveled repeated attacks against a modest Pentagon initiative created in 2021 to address high levels of white supremacy in the military, ultimately neutralizing the effort and leading to the unit’s abandonment. The conservative campaign was directed atmilitary veteran Bishop Garrison, who led the Countering Extremism Working Group, which has now “vanished virtually without a trace,” according to a recent report from CNN.

Garrison was tasked with identifying and addressing the type of extremist views that would be later espoused by Jack Teixeira, who recently stole and leaked a trove of classified information to impress his private online community. Teixeira, currently in custody and potentially facing a 25-year sentence, reportedly believed that the United States was heading toward a “race war” that would pit white people against racial and ethnic minorities and LGBTQ people.

CNN reports:

As the Pentagon grapples with the aftermath of the leak, the working group’s stated objectives look eerily prescient, and, in some cases, tailor-made to zero-in on the sort of anti-government, White supremacist behavior and views espoused by Teixeira.

CNN interviews with multiple sources familiar with the working group reveal that the Pentagon largely abandoned the effort to combat extremism in its ranks, as senior officials folded under political pressure from Republicans who lashed out at the initiative as an example of so-called wokeism in the military.

The U.S. military has a long history of white supremacism in the ranks, including among veterans who have started or joined far-right terrorist groups after their service. More than 80 people charged with participating in the January 6 insurrection had ties to the military, primarily as former service members, according to CBS News.

The apparently successful right-wing effort to sideline Bishop’s group follows the standard conservative playbook of smearing Democratic government officials who are Black, LGBTQ, Muslim, or from other marginalized groups as internal enemies, and it will also likely serve as a template for future, similar campaigns. Right-wing media outlets have spent months convincing their consumers that the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the IRS are persecuting conservatives, with the clear aim of operationalizing these federal agencies against these media figures’ opponents — exactly what they wrongly accuse the Biden administration of doing. This programming dovetails exactly with Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, which claims to be exposing a governmentwide conspiracy to throttle conservative activists and ideas. The committee has so far failed on its own terms, but Jordan remains undeterred.

Anatomy of a smear campaign

On February 16, 2021, Garrison was appointed to a newly created role to advise Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on how to reduce and mitigate the threat of white supremacy in the U.S. military. The announcement went largely unremarked upon in both mainstream and conservative media for several weeks.

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Then on May 5, conservative website Revolver published a story headlined “Meet Bishop Garrison: The Pentagon’s Hatchet Man in Charge of Purging MAGA Patriots and Installing Race Theory in The Military.” The site's founder, Darren Beattie, tweeted the piece out, highlighting the quote “The Biden administration has just put the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi in charge of vetting the entire U.S. military." (Beattie was fired from the Trump administration in 2018 after CNN discovered that he had attended a white nationalist conference two years prior.)

The following day, Fox News Primetime’s host Pete Hegseth devoted a segment to Garrison’s appointment,describing Garrison’s effort as “a purge, a purge of the Defense Department led by a new, and now powerful, radical leftist, a 1619 Project activist, a hardcore social justice Democrat, a man who believes all Trump supporters are racist and extremists."

Video

CitationFrom the May 6, 2021, edition of Fox News' Fox News Primetime

Hegseth then referred to Garrison as “the Pentagon's newly minted MAGA purge man” and cribbed Revolver’s line nearly verbatim but without attribution.

“How do I put this?” Hegseth asked. “The White House just put the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, in charge of vetting the entire U.S. military, past, present, and future."

A day later, Beattie appeared on Hegseth’s program to discuss Revolver’s piece, which largely consisted of Garrison’s tweets and other writings and social media posts.

Video

CitationFrom the May 7, 2021, edition of Fox News' Fox News Primetime

Beattie framed the issue by calling Garrison’s working group an example of “the most disturbing trend in American politics,” which is “that increasing swathes of our own national security apparatus have been repurposed and redeployed domestically against American citizens.”

Days later, conservative media websiteJust the News published a story that highlighted Hegseth’s comments from his initial segment.

On May 13, Revolver published another piece on Garrison with the factually incorrect headline “‘Free Speech Is A Digital Black Plague’: Bishop Garrison is Key Mercenary in Biden’s Dark War Against The First Amendment.”

Despite the quotation marks in the headline, the piece doesn’t include any evidence that Garrison wrote or spoke that exact phrase. Instead, the piece links to an op-ed Garrison published about the dangers of ideological polarization in news consumption leading to the spread of bad information, a fitting if ironic topic given Revolver’s mischaracterization of his stance. It’s true he described what he characterized as partisan echo chambers as a “digital black plague” that poses a danger to social cohesion, a relatively pedestrian observation common among mainstream commentators.

The next day, Beattie appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast to discuss Garrison’s purview more broadly.

Video

CitationFrom the May 14, 2021, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Underscoring the siloed, self-perpetuating conservative media echo chamber, Bannon introduced the topic by claiming, “I’m seeing it everywhere — Just the News has got it, the great Pete Hegseth had it, then he had a second night with you on it,” before asking Beattie for an update.

Beattie then recycled his website’s misleading framing with a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, substituting Garrison’s actual point about information silos with the false claim that he opposed free speech protections more broadly.

Beattie described Garrison’s purported role “in the Biden administration’s dark war on the First Amendment. We’ve uncovered a article of his calling, basically, the free speech digital environment that would include War Room, that would include Revolver, but also in his words includes the Sinclair Network and Fox, as a ‘digital black plague’ — those are his words to describe the digital free speech environment that enables the American people to see narratives that oppose the official narratives on COVID, on the election, and now on [the insurrection of] 1/6.”

One day later, Fox News’ Jesse Watters picked up the story, interviewing Hegsethabout Beattie’s reporting, adding another link in the human-centipede-esque food chain of bad information.

Video

CitationFrom the May 15, 2021, edition of Fox News' Watters' World

Watters introduced Garrison as being “in charge of bringing critical race theory into our Armed Forces,” adding, “They’re calling him the Pentagon's hatchet man because his job is to purge patriots from the ranks.”

“This is about, Jesse, as scary as it gets,” Hegseth responded. “I mean, really this is, this truly is a purge of patriots. They're using January 6 as the ultimate justification.”

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Two days later, former Fox News marquee star Tucker Carlson discussed Garrison on his prime-time show.

Video

CitationFrom the May 17, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Carlson referenced Revolver’s posts before characterizing Garrison as “an activist type” and “a lunatic.”

“Now — and this is the point — he is one of the most powerful officials in the U.S. military,” Carlson added. “Democrats in Congress are thrilled as they watch this. Their party now has all the tanks and drones.”

The campaign against Garrison continued at that pace for weeks, misleading framing and bad information congealing into an impenetrable narrative of conservative persecution. Beattie returned to War Room, right-wing Epoch TV covered the story, Carlson aired another segment on it, and Hegseth continued to beat the drum on Fox News.

As late as October 2022, Beattie referenced Garrison on War Room as an antecedent to a supposedly even more “outrageous” Pentagon commission on recommending changes to military bases named after members of the Confederacy.

Taken as a whole, this process clearly demonstrates how right-wing media will vigorously oppose efforts to mitigate widespread white supremacy and later defend the subsequent, predictable outcomes that ideology and set of power relations produces. As but one example, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson defended Teixeira’s actions by misleadingly casting him as a whistleblower when in fact there is no reporting to suggest he ever meant for the information he stole to be made publicly available. The fact that Teixeira’s bigoted beliefs went unnoticed and undisciplined by the military is a feature, not a bug, of this dynamic.

There are fair criticisms to be made about the larger White House initiative, such as asking what it would mean to root out white supremacy from an institution that has been at the forefront of U.S. empire expansion, directed primarily at nonwhite populations, since at least the Mexican-American War. Needless to say, conservatives were making the exact opposite critique, arguing that attempts to decrease the spread of white supremacist beliefs among service members are inherently illegitimate.

That the boilerplate backlash was successful despite being led by such mediocrities as Pete Hegseth and Darren Beattie — whom Bannon recently derided as a man-child — does not speak particularly well of the Biden administration. It also suggests that these demonization campaigns can potentially succeed absent any shimmering talent leading the charge, instead relying on mid-level functionaries in the larger conservative ecosystem repeatedly hammering the point home.

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https://www.alternet.org/msn/the-marine-corps-gave-marines-received-security-clearances-despite-their-participation-in-the-capitol-riot-report/

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veterans group is appealing to the U.S. Pentagon to implement a ban that would prohibit Fox News from being accessible on military bases.

According to HuffPost, the progressive political action committee (PAC) VoteVets on Monday posted a video to highlight concerns about the right-wing news network and its anchors who have knowingly circulated baseless, unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud following the 2020 presidential election.

“The most valuable weapon to the enemy is disinformation,” the narrator began. “That’s why the Pentagon spends hundreds of millions training our troops to resist it."

"Yet, at the same time, the U.S. military uses taxpayer-funded facilities to broadcast disinformation on military bases, knowingly letting false propaganda infiltrate the ranks," the narrator added.

At one point during the clip, the narrator also noted that Fox News' Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity have “open access to spread their conspiracy theories to U.S. troops."

The push for a Fox News ban on military bases comes as Fox News' Tucker Carlson faces criticism for his latest attempt to spread misleading information about the Jan. 6 insurrection.

During his broadcast on Monday night, Carlson featured subtle clips of Capitol surveillance footage in an effort to support his argument suggesting what transpired on Jan. 6 was not an insurrection.

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rww 12 21

constitutional Sheriff’ Richard Mack Endorses Mark Finchem, Oath Keeper, QAnon Promoter, and Stop the Steal Activist, for Arizona Secretary of State

###

arizona secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem announced last week that he has been endorsed by ‘Constitutional sheriff’ Richard Mack. Finchem is a state representative, promoter of QAnon and stolen election conspiracy theories, and a member of the Oath Keepers militia group who was present at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. He was previously endorsed by former President Donald Trump.

Mack, a former Oath Keepers board member and a supporter of the Bundy family’s armed standoff with federal officials, founded the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which teaches law enforcement officials that “the power of the sheriff even supersedes the powers of the president.” He urges county sheriffs to resist “tyranny” from state and federal governments; during the COVID-19 pandemic, he has told sheriffs to refuse to enforce state public health measures like mask requirements. A recent report by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism warned that CSPOA’s trainings spread anti-government extremism among law enforcement officers.

Right Wing Watch reported this year that Mack is expanding the CSPOA by having county governments as well as individual law enforcement officers join the organization.

Finchem’s website includes a link to a recent appearance on the far-right One America News network in which he talked about the bogus “audit” of Maricopa County votes and claimed, “When we keep digging, we keep uncovering things that are these anomalies which—they turn into evidence, which become proof, which we refer to the attorney general’s office.”

In January, Finchem described the violence at the Capitol as “What happens when the People feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud.” A week after the Capitol insurrection, Finchem claimed that social media deplatforming is “something very similar” to what German Nazis, Pol Pot, and Mao did, warning, “When you silence speech, and you silence thought, the next step is eliminating people.”

Shortly before this year’s elections in Virginia, Finchem spoke ata campaign rally for Virginia Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin.

In 2019, the Phoenix New Times described Finchem as a “fringe lawmaker” who described the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville as “a PSYOP to impugn those of us who stand for the rule of law and civil rights.” During the Obama administration, Finchem claimed that the president was “taking every opportunity to install his ideological, totalitarian dictatorship.”

Arizona’s current secretary of state, Democrat Katie Hobbs, has received death threats and harassment from Trump supporters. She and other election officials targeted by Trump and his allies have told CNN they live in fear of retaliation for not backing Trump’s stolen-election claims. Hobbs is running for governor.

The Associated Press has reported that two other Arizona state legislators running to be the GOP nominee for secretary of state have proposed new restrictions on voting and a bill allowing state legislators to disregard voters and choose their own Electoral College electors.

Some right-wing donors aligned with Trump are focusing on electing Trump allies to oversee future elections. Trump has also endorsed secretary of state candidates in Michigan and Georgia and a proponent of debunked stolen election claims for Michigan attorney general.

Tags: Donald Trump Mark Finchem Richard Mack Arizona audit Election 2020 Election 2022 Election 2024 Misinformation Stop the Steal Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association CSPOA Republican Party

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an 822

the founder of a neo-Nazi terror network comprised of former military service members who sought to create a base in Idaho appears to be talking to federal prosecutors about a potential plea deal.

Posting on Iron March — a now-defunct global online forum for accelerationist neo-Nazis — in 2017, Liam Montgomery Collins wrote, “I live in the Northeast, so I have a tightknit crew of ex-mil and security I train with. We do hikes, gym sessions, live firing exercises, and we eventually plan to buy a lot of land. Can’t really specify the name or details because it’s an inner-circle thing, but it will serve its purpose when the time comes.

“Think of it as a modern-day SS,” Collins added, referencing the elite corps of the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler.

It was through Iron March that Collins met Paul James Kryscuk, an actor who specialized in a subgenre of pornography that is degrading to women of color and helped him build theterror network that they called “BSN.”

Collins entered the Marine Corps in August 2017 and recruited fellow Marine Jordan Duncan and Justin Wade Hermanson while stationed at Camp LeJeune in North Carolina.

In 2020, Kyrscuk relocated from New York City to Boise, Idaho. Members of the network stalked Black Lives Matter members in Boise and held a live-fire training that attracted Joseph Maurino, an enlisted member of the New Jersey Army National Guard. Another member, Joseph Zacharek, joined the Lafayette, Ind. Police Department as a probationary recruit in the summer of 2020, and remained employed there for four months until he was doxed by an antifascist researcher and was fired.

In an Instagram chat on Oct. 1, 2020, Kryscuk and Duncan fantasized about shooting protesters in Boise, according to a federal indictment.

Duncan: “How the BSNs finna be pulling up to chipotle after hitting legs.”

Kryscuk: “Death squad…. Assassins creed hoodies and suppressed 22 pistols.”

Duncan: “People freaking tf out.”

Kryscuck: “About what?”

Duncan: “The end of democracy.”

Kryscuk: “One can hope.”

When the FBI raided Kryscuk’s home in Boise in October 2020, they found a list of assassination targets that included Black Lives Matter founders Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, and a list of intersections that were consistent with power stations. The investigation revealed a plot to attack the power grid to create a blackout before undertaking an assassination campaign. A fourth Marine who joined BSN after serving in the same unit as Collins and Hermanson began cooperating with the authorities in October 2020, along with Zacharek, the former police officer, according to testimony by Naval Criminal Investigative Service Special Agent Chris Little.

Kryscuk and Collins wereinitially charged with conspiracy to illegally manufacture and transport firearmsin October 2020. A superseding indictment the following month added Duncan and Hermanson as defendants. A second superseding indictment filed in June 2021 added Maurino as the fifth defendant. And in August 2021, a third superseding indictment expanded the charges to include conspiracy to destroy an energy facility.

Kryscuk and Hermanson accepted plea deals earlier this year that include agreements to cooperate with the government’s investigation and testify against their codefendants.In return for their cooperation, the two men could receive reductions from expected prison sentences of up to 15 years.

Collins was previously scheduled to be arraigned in the Eastern District of North Carolina on Sept. 6, but last week Chief District Judge Richard E. Myers agreed to push back the date to Nov. 1. The new date gives Collins and the government time to work out a deal.

In a motion filed on July 27, Collins' lawyer, Elliot S. Abrams, wrote, “Undersigned counsel has been in discussions with the government about a potential resolution of this matter. These discussions have been fruitful and undersigned counsel requests this additional time to continue discussions with the government regarding non-trial disposition.”

Duncan and Maurino, the two remaining defendants, are both currently scheduled to be arraigned in Wilmington on Sept. 20.

Kryscuk’s sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 20 in Wilmington, while Hermanson’s sentencing is set for the Sept. 22 term.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/patriot-front-2657558190/

an 6 22 no lnx

PB t shirt gangs of NY DDL

Report details the chilling ways far-right extremists are recruiting military veterans

Members of the Proud Boys in Raleigh, North Carolina in November 2018, Wikimedia Commons

Alex Henderson June 24, 2022

From a mass shooting in a Buffalo, New York supermarket on May 14 to the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in October 2018 to a plot to kidnap and possibly murder Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — not to mention the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol Building — the United States clearly has a problem with White supremacist and White nationalist terrorism. And one of the places where racist extremists, according to law enforcement officials and national security experts, are trying to recruit new members is the U.S. military.

Reporter Sonner Kehrt, in article published by The War Horse on June 23 and republished by Navy Times that day, takes an in-depth look at White power groups that are trying to convert veterans to their cause. And her piece points to Chris Buckley, an Afghan War veteran, as an example of a veteran who racists targeted for recruitment.

After serving in Afghanistan, Kehrt reports, Buckley was incredibly angry — angry because of the death of a close friend and fellow veteran in Afghanistan, angry because of the severe back pain he was living with because of a training accident. And Buckley was attracted to the anger expressed by a Facebook group, not realizing, at first, that the people he was chatting with online wereKu Klux Klan members. Buckley joined the KKK in 2014, but he has since distanced from that terrorist group.

“With the help of a former extremist, Buckley left the KKK,” Kehrt explains. “Today, he works with Parents for Peace, an organization dedicated to supporting families and friends trying to help loved ones leave extremist groups. He points to his experience in the months and years after he left the Army National Guard as an example of why a disproportionate number of veterans are vulnerable to extremist recruitment efforts.”

Buckley, interviewed by The War Horse, warned, “I would rival KKK recruiters to that of any military recruiter I ever talked to…. I was looking for something to be a part of something. I needed a mission.”

Buckley, according to Kehrt, is hardly the only military veteran who has been vulnerable to recruitment by White supremacists and White nationalists.

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“The data that does exist suggests the problem is growing,” Kehrt reports. “Statistics from the Center for Strategic & International Studies show that 6.4% of all domestic terror plots and attacks in the United States in 2020 were committed by active-duty or reserve service members — a tiny percentage, but up from 1.5% in 2019. A 2019 poll by Military Times found that more than 1 in 3 troops surveyed reported seeing direct evidence of White nationalism within the military.”

Kehrt continues, “That’s also up, from 1 in 4 in 2017…. While the total number of veterans who join extremist groups is still very small, they play an outsize role in these groups, particularly in militia-style organizations. (Researcher) Amy Cooter and other experts have found that, very roughly, 30 to 40% of militia members have military experience.”

Because there are so many different far-right extremist groups in the U.S. in 2022 — from Patriot Front to the Proud Boys to the Oath Keepers to the Boogaloo Bois to Patriot Prayer — the KKK, which has a long history of terrorism, doesn’t receive as much attention as it did in the past. But Buckley warns that the KKK is still a threat, although they have changed some of their tactics.

Buckley told The War Horse, “They’re doing away with the ‘let’s protest in public with pointy hats and robes.’ The KKK is shifting towards a more militia-style environment.”

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cop trainers racist

https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/police/

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4/22 edit bd

I don’t follow what every Democrat says. No one can. There’s no way for me to know whether the tenor and tone of their collective rhetoric changed last week. But it felt like it got stronger, sharper and angrier.

Consider Brian Schatz.

The Hawaii Senator took to the Senate floor to scorch his colleague Josh Hawley of Missouri, who’s been holding up appointments to the Department of Defense that are necessary to America’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Before he signs off, he said, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin must resign for his “failures” in Afghanistan.

Schatz said that’s rich coming from a guy who raised his fist in solidarity with the J6 insurrectionists and who voted to acquit the former president for the high crime of extorting Ukraine’s president.

“This comes from a guy who before the Russian invasion suggested that maybe it would be wise for [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy to make a few concessions about Ukraine and their willingness to join NATO.”

He added:

“They withheld lethal aid until, unless Zelenskyy released false smears against Joe Biden's son. Then [Hawley] voted to exonerate President Trump for this. So spare me the new solidarity with the Ukrainians and with the free world, because this man's record is exactly the opposite.”

His tirade amazed those of us longing for the Democrats to take a strong stand against the Republican Party’s lies and bad faith. Perhaps we’ll see more now that Greg Sargent put a brighter light on it.

The Post columnist interviewed Brian Schatz on Friday. “Democrats need to make more noise,” the Senator conceded. “We have to scream from the rooftops because this is a battle for the free world now.”

Let’s not forget what Schatz said, however.

He said Hawley is “doing a very specific thing.”

“He is damaging the Department of Defense.”

So far, Schatz is the only Democrat seeing what needs seeing.

Though he says he’s outraged by the US pullout from Afghanistan, Josh Hawley is also attacking, directly, the military leadership itself. (He won’t move on appointments until the secretary of defense resigns.)

Demanding Austin’s resignation is not a “reasonable request,” Schatz said. It can’t be. The point is sabotaging civilian control of the military.

You read that right.

The point is cleaving the ranks. The point is to create conditions in which military personnel feel inspired to take action that’s favorable to the Republicans’ (perhaps the former president’s) return to power.

They are picking up where the J6 insurrection left off. But next time, it won’t be a mob of schlubs. It will be an army of highly-trained insurgents bent on restoring whiteness to the center of the republic.

At gunpoint.

Everyone should see what Schatz sees.

So I interviewed Fred Wellman, founder of Beer Hall Projectand a 20-year Army veteran who served when Secretary Austin was General Austin. I called Fred after US Rep. Matt Gaetz failed to humiliate the secretary in testimony before the House Arms Services Committee.

Fred said: “A standing army can’t be a tool of a political party. Under the Trump years, it became more partisan. Now Matt Gaetz and his peers in the Republican Party are directly undermining the apolitical and nonpolitical nature of the military by dividing troops from leaders.”

Matt Gaetz and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Thoughts?

My main frustration has always been with the “performance wing” of the Republican Party. They don’t want to govern. They want to act.

In this case, Matt Gaetz tried convincing people that “wokeism,” or trying to get a more diverse American military force, is hurting our ability to fight wars. It shows how monumentally stupid he is.

He's dragging culture wars into national defense. That he does so while sitting on the House Armed Service Committee is outrageous.

It’s a committee responsible for oversight of the men and women in uniform, but it’s oversight partially provided by someone as monumentally asinine as Matt Gaetz – that’s just disgusting to me.

Good point. When a country sends people overseas, the presumption should be that leaders will take that responsibility deadly seriously. Deadly serious responsibility is the opposite of Matt Gaetz.

I'm a 20-year Army veteran. I rose through the ranks to be a lieutenant colonel. I retired after Desert Storm and three Iraq tours. I’m the son of a World War II Marine veteran. My son is an Army veteran. My son-in-law continues to serve in the National Guard.

But not everybody can serve.

Less than 7 percent of our nation is veterans. Less than 1 percent serve at all. Less than one-third of the eligible population is capable of serving. I'm talking about fitness, criminal record, mental health, etc. This is the reality of maintaining and growing an all-volunteer force.

That's the point of trying to increase the diversity of the officer corps. That's the point of trying to increase the diversity of the pilot corps. That's the point of welcoming all races and creeds. As Secretary Austin said, anybody who's eligible, who has the capability to serve, should be welcomed even if they're non-binary, gay, straight, whatever.

If they're capable of serving, of meeting the physical and mental requirements we need in our military, we've got to open our arms.

There are just not enough white dudes left.

When you have someone like the Florida congressman directly attacking that, that turns away possible recruits. Gaetz is literally undermining those who serve and who may serve in the future.

Sounds like you’re angry?

I amangry.

The Matt Gaetzs and Marsha Blackburns of the world are openly undermining good order and military discipline with a culture war for political effect. A representative sitting on the Armed Services Committee should understand the challenges of an all-volunteer force.

Civilian oversight of the military matters even though those civilians may never have served, may not have been qualified to serve. People like me, people like Secretary Austin – we understand that. Someone who rose to the rank of four-star understands he’s going to answer to some 25-year-old kid on the Armed Services Committee.

That's the nature of it.

But what frustrates me is the lack of respect for the office and a lack of respect for the military as an apolitical and non-political entity.

One of the biggest fears of our founding fathers was a standing army. They didn't want one and that undermined efforts early on in the republic because of rebellions. We had no army to address them.

Even Washington was like, man, we need an army.

A standing army can’t be a tool of a political party. Under the Trump years, it became more partisan. Now Matt Gaetz and his peers in the Republican Party are directly undermining the apolitical and nonpolitical nature of the military by dividing troops from leaders.

The troops love Trump, they believe, but the troops are being failed by “woke” leaders. Where the fuck do you think the leaders are? You don't just magically make a general. Secretary Austin started as a fucking second lieutenant. He rose through the ranks. This is dangerous.

I do not say this lightly.

This is incredibly dangerous.

They attack the military leadership as“woke”because they're trying to cause a break in the ranks. They're literally undermining good order and military discipline deliberately to break the chain of command.

I've never seen that in my lifetime.

You’re describing national security risk. Is that overstating it?

No, I don't think so.

The very nature of our republic relies on an apolitical military every American knows serves them, no matter their race, creed, religion, color, region, political party, whatever. Our republic depends on everyone knowing a standing army is not a threat to the country.

Many in the Republican Party are super-fans of Putin, let's be honest.They're having CPAC in Hungary, for God's sake, a country led by a rightwing dictator, a Putin fan. Imagine a scenario in which they’re in power and we can't fight because they’ve undermined the military.

It's terrifying to think where this could go.

I've seen reports of white nationalism gaining traction in the ranks of the military. There's an effort from above to deal with that.

I learned in military science 101 at West Point that an all-volunteer force is a direct reflection of our society. You raised your children for 18 years before they get into the military. I give them 12 weeks of basic training. That won’t overcome 18 years of raising them as racists.

All I can do is ensure they don't act on those beliefs and undermine good order and military discipline. If they do behave inappropriately, we use the separate military system to discipline them appropriately and remove them from the military as they're no longer a threat.

But we do know white nationalist and patriot front-type groups have been actively sending “their troops,” if you will, into the military for military training. Right-wing nationalist groups are infiltrating the ranks and recruiting veterans after they get out of the military.

At one point,10 percent of Jan6 cases were United States military and veterans. One of them is an active-duty Marine Corps major!

How horrifying that is.

Talk about the fundamental tension between universal values, like honor, and individual interest, like investment in whiteness.

Some really extreme right-wing politicians say universal values are an attack on conservative thought. It's not against conservative thought.

Conservative thought should mean taxes and “pulling up my bootstraps and raising myself up by going into the military” – that's fine.

Saying Black people are inferior soldiers, assaulting the ranks, inciting homophobia and transphobia and attacking fellow service members – That’s not conservative. That’s extremism, white nationalism.

That needs to be stomped out.

There have been several surveys of service members saying the biggest threat they face isn’t Muslim terrorists. It’s extremism in the ranks....

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/2024-election/

3 mil leaders warn 2024; pentagon new guidelines on RW

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no lnx

Black flag: Understanding the Trumpists' latest threatening symbol

Chauncey DeVega and Salon October 12, 2021

It's an old truism that the "real bad men" (and bad women) "move in silence and violence." That's certainly true for the most dangerous and most effective of Donald Trump's allies, henchmen, henchwomen, and other followers. But for Donald Trump himself, and most of his political cult, that rule does not apply.

Trump and his followers were loud, exuberant and enthusiastic on Jan. 6. The lethal attack on the Capitol had been publicly announced weeks in advance, and should have come as no surprise. Trump's rallies and gatherings continue to celebrate violence and the prospect of revenge — and specifically of "getting even" with Trump's "enemies."

Steve Bannon, Trump's former campaign chairman and White House strategist, has now threatened to recruit Republican-fascist "shock troops" with the apparent goal of undermining the U.S. government, and by implication multiracial democracy, if and when Trump and the Republicans regain control of both Congress and the White House.

On a daily basis Fox News and other elements of the right-wing disinformation propaganda machine use stochastic terrorism and other techniques to radicalize their audience into committing acts of political violence. To this point, the Democratic Party and the political and news media class in general have remained in denial, and largely passive in response.

In one troubling new development, Trump supporters have begun flying all-black American flags, in an implicit threat to harm or kill their opponents — meaning nonwhite people,"socialist liberals," Muslims, vaccinated people and others deemed to be "enemies" of "real America." As media critic Eric Boehlert recently noted, the liberal opinion site Living Blue in Texas is sounding the alarm about the specific meaning of the black flag and the Republican-fascists support for terrorism and other political violence. That post, "Are Your Republican Neighbors Planning on Killing You?", merits lengthy quotation:

It didn't take long to find hundreds of videos where these Trumpers and so-called patriots were hanging black American flags. ...

Black American flags are the flags that mean "no quarter shall be given." They are the opposite of the white flag of surrender.

According to the people on TikTok and the Sun (British tabloid), the black American flag originated in the civil war and was flown by the Confederates.

It means that they will not surrender, will not take prisoners, and are willing to die for their cause. It means they will execute their enemies.

Who are their enemies? Pretty much any non-Conservative. You know, Democrats, Liberals, LGBTQ, BIPOC, and the vaccinated. ...

So, we're the enemy, and they're openly professing to want to execute us. … So, why are they doing this

Covid vaccinations, mostly. They believe that Joe Biden has declared a civil war on them by mandating that employers with over 100 employees and the military have vaccinations.

Yes, they say civil war, and they say it's already started. But, unfortunately, many of them also live in states where masks and vaccines are required by state governments, healthcare, and law enforcement.

An alarming number of military members have been making Tik Toks talking about how they are being discharged because they refuse the vaccine. It's alarming because there is probably an equal number of guys on there talking about the civil war plans and actively using Tik Tok to recruit these military and ex-military members.

The biggest message they have been sending out is, "it's time" or "the time is now." ...

Although showing guns on Tik Tok is supposed to be against community guidelines, they show lots of videos of their guns, shooting them, wearing them, or sitting on their bed.

They primarily use Tik Tok as a recruiting tool and let others know their willingness to commit violence. Then they tell people to message them or where to find them on Telegram.

However you interpret these videos posted by Trump followers and other neofascists — which could be mainly performative — it is clearly true that the American right is increasingly willing to accept or condone violence as a means of expanding and protecting their social and political power. (Salon did not find licensed news photographs of these flags, and has made the editorial decision not to reproduce the images mentioned above, which are easy to find on social media.)

Public opinion polls and other research have repeatedly shown that millions of Republican voters and Trump followers would support the use of violence to remove Joe Biden from office because of the "Big Lie" and their belief that that he is not a legitimate president. Similarly, a large proportion of Republicans believe that the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were "patriots" whose use of violence was justified.

And a new poll from the University of Virginia's Center for Politics even suggests that more than 50 percent of Trump supporters want "red states" to secede from the Union. Republican elected officials and other right-wing opinion leaders have continued to escalate their threats of political violence against Democrats and other targeted groups.

In a recent speech to the North Carolina Faith and Freedom Coalition's "Salt & Light" conference, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., issued what sounded like a declaration of war:

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It is time for the American Christian church to come out of the shadows to say, "No longer are we going to allow our culture to be determined by people who hate the things that we believe in…. We are going to stand valiantly for God's incredible inherent truths that predate any version of government. Because, my friends, if we lose this country today, if we bend the knee to the Democrats today, our country will be lost forever, our children will never know what freedom is. It's our duty to stand up, Let us stand united as men and women of faith to fight for our country.

During an interview with MSNBC's Joy Reid, terrorism and national security expert Malcolm Nance said that Cawthorn's video "picks up on the themes that are not just coming from the Steve Bannon level and Donald Trump level, they are coming from the Republican street — and that Republican street is armed. They're angry. They have been fed an entire line which makes them believe that America is no longer America and that they no longer want the America that the rest of us, the 60 percent of the country, live in. And they`re willing to take up arms for it."

Nance also noted that Cawthorn's propaganda video is thematically similar to the type of propaganda used by Islamic terrorist groups such as ISIS and al-Qaida to radicalize and recruit members.

During an interview with Scientific American magazine, Dr. Bandy Lee, the principal editor of the 2017 bestseller "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump," explained how a mentally pathological leader can "infect" his followers and perhaps even an entire nation:

I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence — while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a "lock and key" relationship….

"Shared psychosis" — which is also called "folie à millions" ["madness for millions"] when occurring at the national level or "induced delusions" — refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person's symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia andpropensity for violence — even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.

Trump and his regime gave permission and encouragement to his followers and other supporters to engage in antisocial and other anti-human behavior on a national scale. Once such a process has begun, and those forces are unleashed, it is not easy to stop. Fascism is not a simple machine with an on-and-off switch. In practice, fascism is given life and takes corporeal form through its followers, with each one being a potential carrier of the pathology.

As Hussein Ibish warned in a recent article in the Atlantic, "The cancer of political violence is not an endemic American disease. At the moment, it is a Republican disease. No one but Republicans themselves can cure it. Until they do, the violence of the right is only going to keep swelling and crashing. From a Middle Eastern perspective, this is all appallingly familiar."

Fascism is a highly virulent social disease that usually destroys the host body – but not before spreading the disease to many other people. In fact, if the original host dies, he or she can be elevated to the status of martyr for "the cause," serving to inspire existing followers and lure in new ones.

Ultimately, Donald Trump, like other fascist and authoritarian leaders, is the symptom of a sick society. Trumpism is not actually the core disease. For America to counteract the deep underlying illness that has made Trumpism possible will require a long-term cultural and moral reckoning. Anything less, and the disease of American fascism will only go dormant until it is resurrected again — perhaps in a more dangerous and virulent form.

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1021 ah an

January 6 insurrection should have discouraged Americans from having anything to do with the Oath Keepers, one of the far-right groups that violently attacked the U.S. Capitol Building in the hope of preventing Congress from certifying now-President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory over then-President Donald Trump. Instead, hundreds of people have since joined the extremist militia group, according to Guardian reporter Jason Wilson.

Wilson reports that "hacked materials from" the Oath Keepers' website "show that hundreds of people either joined or renewed their membership after many of the group's members participated in the attack on the Capitol on 6 January."

According to Wilson, "The post-Capitol attack membership surge is evident in payment records from the Oath Keepers website. They show that 801 people either joined the organization or made donations after 4 January, when founder Stewart Rhodes posted an article on the website headlined 'Oath Keepers Deploying to DC to Protect Events, Speakers, & Attendees on Jan 5-6: Time to Stand!' But almost all of that number — 788 altogether — joined or donated after Oath Keepers members participated in the incursion into the Capitol Building on 6 January, with the records showing that the surge built momentum in January before slowing in February, March and April, where the records end."

The Oath Keepers, Wilson notes, made "explicit calls for military and law enforcement volunteers."

"There were no e-mail addresses linked to military or government employers in the trove," Wilson reports, "but ten sign-ups noted their military ranks in an optional 'title' field, which ranged between corporal and colonel, including three men who offered the rank of lieutenant colonel. The Guardian's investigation of the record showed that the majority of these are retired, but some have gone on to work in other sensitive roles."

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921 an

when a coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 4.7 million people worldwide and over 695,000 of them are in the United States — according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore — a vaccine mandate for the U.S. Armed Forces makes perfect sense. But a lawsuit filed by a "MAGA medical group," consisting of far-right anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, is aiming to stop the Pentagon's vaccine mandate, according to Daily Beast senior researcher Adam Rawnsley.

Gen. Lloyd J. Austin, Secretary of Defense in the Biden administration, ordered all active-duty members of the U.S. Armed Forces to get vaccinated for COVID-19 — and the far-right MAGA anti-vaxxers, in response, have filed a lawsuit against the Pentagon.

Rawnsley, in an article published on September 30, explains, "Lt. Col. Theresa M. Long, who serves as the brigade surgeon for the Army's 1st Aviation Brigade, filed an affidavit late last week in support of the suit's motion to block the vaccine mandate — arguing against the requirement based in part on her false belief that 'all persons who have received a COVID-19 vaccine are damaged in their cardiovascular system in an irreparable and irrevocable manner'…. The affidavit was filed as part of a suit brought by lawyers working with America's Frontline Doctors (AFLDS), according to the group, and requests a declaratory judgment blocking the vaccine requirement, on behalf of Staff Sergeants Dan Robert (USA), Hollie Mulvihill (USMC), and anti-vaxxers within the military."

Long, according to Rawnsley, "has joined a small but increasingly vocal group of field-grade officers encouraged by conservative activists and media as part of the right wing's crusade against COVID-19 vaccine mandates."

"The few officers and enlisted service members who have gone public with their opposition to the vaccine mandate are now finding increasing support among Republican members of Congress," Rawnsley notes. "Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), James Lankford (R-OK), Roger Marshall (R-KS), Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), for example, have recently drafted (a) proposed amendment to the annual National Defense Authorization Act that would gut the proposed vaccine mandate."

According to Rawnsley, roughly 70% of the U.S. military has been vaccinated for COVID-19. Austin and President Joe Biden would like to get that number even higher.

The good news about the AFLDS lawsuit, according to Rawnsley, is that it "faces long odds."

"Within the military," Rawnsley observes, "Long's own court filing suggests that ardent anti-vaccine attitudes may not be that widely shared. Long wrote that she's encountered 'mixed results in terms of acceptance, rejection and threats of punishment' over her opinions."

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This US Marine bragged about planning white supremacist terror attacks: FBI

Alex Henderson

June 27, 2021

Involvement in white supremacist and white nationalist terrorist groups is especially dangerous when someone has been enlisted in the U.S. military, as that person has been trained in the use of weapons. An article

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/secret-facebook-groups-reveal-how-prevalent-racist-beliefs-election-lies-and-qanon-theories-are-among-military-members/

a disturbing number of Facebook users who belong to America's military and other special forces have deep-rooted beliefs and views on racism and other conspiracy theories such as the QAnon movement and the falsehoods surrounding the presidential election.

NBC News has conducted an analysis of hundreds of social media posts shared in four secret Facebook groups for "current and former Rangers, Green Berets and other elite warriors. The publication notes that most of the politically charged content was shared within two groups—SF Brotherhood - PAC and US Special Forces Team Room.

Collectively, there are more than 5,000 Facebook users within those two groups with some users belonging to both private groups. Across the board, the U.S. Special Operations Command consists of approximately 70,000 personnel. Additionally, the special operations forces also have thousands more retired members. The highlighted Facebook posts cover a vast canvas of conspiracy theories.

For example, in one of the posts, a special forces member raised concerns about one conspiracy theory as he claimed "several aides to former Vice President Mike Pence were part of a 'Concerted effort by the thieves and pedophiles walking the hallowed halls of the people's government.'"

On Jan.7, just one day after the Capitol insurrection, a member of the U.S. Special Forces Team Room posted a message that read, "Trump was sabotaged once again!" adding, "trying to get to the bottom of the obvious election fraud now looks like it doesn't have a chance."

According to the publication's analysis, there are many disturbing posts that are relatively similar. The analysis has raised concern about the mindset of many members of the United States' lethally trained forces. Jack Murphy, a former Army Ranger and Green Beret recently voiced his concerns about radicalization within the special operations forces community.

"The story of radicalization in special operations is a story that needs to be told," said Murphy. "It has shocked and horrified me to see what's happened to these guys in the last five or six years."

Garry Reid, director of defense intelligence at the U.S. Department of Defense, noted that the Pentagon is currently working to incorporate methods to "better identify, detect, categorize and take action against any such behaviors in this department."

Reid said, "This is very disturbing material for me and very disturbing content that in no way would mirror the behavior expected of persons employed by the Department of Defense, and certainly not serving in the U.S. military."

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

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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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coast guard guy?

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2006 fbi on cops

https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist-infiltration-fbi/

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lt Gen. Thomas McInerney, a retired U.S. Air Force veteran, has not been shy about pushing ridiculous conspiracy theories — whether he was promoting the racist "birther" theory that President Barack Obama wasn't really born in the U.S. or claiming that the late Sen. John McCain divulged information to the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War.

Now, McInerney is doubling down on his recent claim that U.S. Special Forces died during a recent attack on a CIA computer facility in Germany — where, McInerney claimed, information was being kept on a plot to flip votes from President Donald Trump to President-elect Joe Biden. But as Military.com explained, the Army has debunked McInerney's claims as nonsense.

reporter Gina Harkins explains, "No special forces soldiers were killed while seizing computer servers in Germany as part of a CIA operation after the presidential election. There was, in fact, no mission of the sort. And members of the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion are not 'the kraken' that an attorney for President Donald Trump said, last month, she'd be unleashing. The unit is not involved in any post-election missions supporting the White House — a move that would be highly unlikely considering it's an entry-level training battalion where new soldiers who haven't yet picked up their military occupational specialty are assigned."

The Trump attorney that Harkins is referring to is Sidney Powell, who promised to "release the kraken" with her lawsuits challenging Biden's victory. A kraken, in Scandinavian folklore, is a giant sea monster—and the expression "release the kraken" was used in the 1981 fantasy film, "The Clash of the Titans."

A U.S. Army official, discussing McInerney's election claims, told Military.com, "The allegations are false." Harkins notes that the 83-year-old McInerney "made the claims last weekend on a show hosted by Brannon Howse on the far-right WVW Broadcast Network, which streamed the discussion on YouTube. The claims quickly spread on social media, with users tying the retired general's comments to unsubstantiated allegations of fraud during November's presidential election.

in 2018, McInerney was banned from Fox News and Fox Business after appearing on Charles Payne's show and defaming McCain as "Songbird John," which was his way of making the baseless claim that McCain gave information to the View Cong while he was a POW during the Vietnam War. Before that, McInerney promoted the racist "birther" conspiracy theory and claimed that Obama was "constitutionally ineligible to hold office" because he wasn't really a U.S. citizen.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/marines/

Three Marine Corps veterans and their porn-star neo-Nazi guru, arrested last month on charges that they engaged in an interstate gun-running scheme, comprised a band of violent fascists who had recently moved to Idaho with the intent of making it a base of operations for their plans to engage in acts of domestic terrorism, federal prosecutors revealed this week.

According to the grand-jury indictment filed this week by prosecutors in North Carolina, the men's schemes went well beyond those with which they have been charged—namely, buying semiautomatic rifles, altering them into automatics, then shipping them from Idaho to North Carolina. The foursome not only engaged in paramilitary training in the Idaho desert, they surveilled two separate Black Lives Matters marches in Boise this summer and discussed killing participants. They also plotted to assassinate BLM founder Alicia Garza.

Three of the four men—Justin Hermanson, 21, who used the code name "Sandman"; Liam Collins, 21, aka "Disciple"; and Jordan Duncan, 25, aka "Soldier"—had met while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps. The fourth—Paul Kryscuk, 35, whose nom de plume was "Deacon"—was a porn star (under the stage name "Pauly Harker") who had lived most of his life on Long Island, New York. He met the other men online in the now-defunct neo-Nazi message board Iron March, and was the group's general leader, though all they identified as members of the terrorist organization Atomwaffen Division.

Back in 2017, when Iron March was still active, the men had discussed among themselves how to create "a modern day SS," as one of them put it, referencing the Nazi paramilitary organization Schutzstaffel, the indictment says. Kryscuk outlined the group's long-range plan then:

"First order of business is knocking down The System, mounting it and smashing it's face until it has been beaten past the point of death … eventually we will have to bring the rifles out and go to work."

"Second order of business ... is the seizing of territory and the Balkanization of North America. Buying property in remote areas that are already predominantly white and right leaning, networking with locals, training, farming, and stockpiling."

"Start buying property now in the types of regions mentioned above and get to work on building your own group. …As time goes on in this conflict, we will expand our territories and slowly take back the land that is rightfully ours. ... As we build our forces and our numbers, we will move into the urban areas and clear them out. This will be a ground war very reminiscent of Iraq as we will essentially be facing an insurgent force made up of criminals and gang members."

Kryscuk bought a home in the Boise area in February 2020 and moved there, and Duncan and Collins gradually followed suit. Hermanson—who was stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and remains an active member of the Marine Corps—joined them in July for a training exercise in the Idaho desert. The participants in compiled a video of the live footage from that training, showing Kryscuk and another person firing a variety of rifles. At the end, the four men—all outfitted in Atomwaffen masks—are seen giving the Nazi salute beneath a Sonnenrad, an occult Nazi symbol. The final frame reads: "Come home white man."

Prosecutors say the purpose of the gun-running scheme was "to regularly and repetitively manufacture and transport firearms and firearm parts, to include suppressors, in a manner that the government would not know the recipients had them, for criminal purposes"—namely "in furtherance of a civil disorder."

The "civil disorder" included attacking the Black Lives Matter movement, including its leadership. Garza reported in a tweet last week that the FBI had informed her that her name had appeared on a list of targets found in one of the men's homes in Boise.

"This is why this President is so dangerous," she added. "He is stoking fires he has no intention of controlling. I'm ok y'all, but this shit is not ok."

The neo-Nazi gang had twice conducted surveillance on BLM events in Boise: First, on July 21, at a rally on the campus of Boise State University, Kryscuk was observed within visual range of the event, first sitting in a parked vehicle and driving around the gathering slowly.

Then, on August 18, Kryscuk was observed lurking in the vicinity of a BLM rally/protest at a park in downtown Boise.

Kryscuk and Duncan just last month discussed in a text chat how things would go down after their group—which they called "the BSN" (a prosecutors office spokesman declined to explain the meaning of the acronym)—attacked BLM marchers as they envisioned:

"How the BSNs finna be pulling up to chipotle after hitting legs," Duncan asked.

"Death squad," Kryscuk answered, adding: "Assassins creed hoodies and suppressed 22 pistols."

"People freaking tf out," Duncan replied.

"About what," Kryscuk asked.

"'The end of democracy'," Duncan wrote.

"One can hope," Kryscuk answered.

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SARS-CoV-2 Transmission among Marine Recruits during Quarantine ›

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ref

https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-happens-when-ex-navy-seals-go-full-qanon?ref=home

no lnx many

a man filmed leaving the area of an attempted pipe bomb attack on protesters in Portland, Oregon, was a former Navy SEAL who writes conspiracy theory-heavy social media posts decrying the left, Portland activists and news media recently reported.

But the man is just one of an eclectic mix of former SEALs apparently taken in by conspiracy theories online or citing those theories in violent writings. If acted on by highly trained ex-military elite, those paranoias have deadly potential.

Witnesses in Portland say two men threw three homemade explosives at protesters early on the morning of Aug. 8. Although no one was harmed and the men do not appear to have been filmed, citizen journalist Scott Keeler pursued a man spotted in the area and filmed his face. Activists and Oregon Public Broadcasting identified the man asLouis Garrick Fernbaugh, a former SEAL and CIA contractor. Fernbaugh, 52, has been named by police as a person of interest, but not charged with a crime.

Online, Fernbaugh has an extensive history of writing about conspiracy theories, particularly where they implicated the left. In this respect, he is part of a broader pattern of ex-SEALs, many of them with large digital followings, espousing conspiratorial ideas. They’re armed, suspicious, and in some cases, write in detail about potential plans to kill people they view as evildoers.

“People who are ex-military say, ‘I’m going to go liberate the kids.’ Is it bravado or is it a legitimate call to action?”

— Marc-André Argentino]

In particular, some ex-SEALs are promoting belief in QAnon or related theories that falsely accuse many of President Donald Trump’s opponents of being involved in Satanic pedophilia and cannibalism.

Marc-André Argentino, an associate fellow at the Global Network on Extremism & Technology,who monitors the QAnon conspiracy theory, said that theory—which has become one of the foremost in U.S. politics—has inspired an uptick in criminal acts by believers. (The Navy did not return a request for comment.)

“The violence we’ve seen has been by people without acumen and physical training,” Argentino told The Daily Beast. “Where it could get scary is with people who do have training.”

[QAnon Pushes Pedo-Ring Plots. Now They’re Stealing Kids.

RAMPING UP THE CRAZY

Will Sommer]

SEALs like Fernbaugh, who could not be reached for comment for this story, have extensive military training, and might be better equipped than the average person to build an explosive device or take up weapons. A grizzled ex-special operative with a graying beard, Fernbaugh has spent years dabbling in false conspiracy theories, some of them anti-Semitic and many targeting anti-fascists, who have been highly visible at Portland protests. (The Daily Beast did not review any posts in which he expressed affinity for QAnon.)

“George Soros is known to have paid ANTIFA to instigate rioting and create chaos that has caused millions in damage across numerous cities, but especially Portland, OR,” he wrote on Facebook in 2018, citing a conspiracy theory that falsely accuses a Jewish philanthropist of paying off protesters.

In the caption of a video on the same topic, Fernbaugh mused that “I’m surprised no one has slaughtered these sheep that have grown horns (ANTIFA),” and recent posts boasted of “infiltrating” groups of Portland anti-fascists during ongoing racial justice protests.

Fernbaugh appears to wear the same jacket in one of the videos as the man identified as him did in the footage from the aftermath of the Portland attack.He currently works selling shooting targets, including one made to look like a person dressed as a Portland anti-fascist.

Multiple people who know Fernbaugh, including a former colleague, told OPB that he was the man featured in Keeler’s video from near the scene of the explosive devices. A former law enforcement official told the publication that, based on the voice of the man in the video, they were comfortable enough in his identity that they were calling the FBI.

Meanwhile, the larger online conspiracy community is sprawling—the top QAnon groups on Facebook, alone, count more than 3 million combined members, according to an internal Facebook investigation, NBC News reported last week. These theories sometimes overlap in membership, and encompass millions of other people, spanning a range of false claims like that vaccines cause autism to the idea that the world is flat. In a group that large, some will almost inevitably be military or veterans.

But QAnon and related conspiracy theories like Pizzagate (both of which baselessly accuse Democrats of child abuse) seem to have an unusually high incidence among ex-SEALs. And some retired SEALs have been vocal in more explicit support for QAnon in particular, even if they have not been tied to the scene of alleged protest-related violence.

“If these people aren’t brought to justice, there’s gonna be some fuckin’ street justice doled out.”

— Stephen Ralston, ex-Navy SEAL

Stephen Ralston is a veteran who served on SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team One from 1990 to 1994, and SEAL Team Three from 1994 to 1998. Currently, he works as a private military contractor, according to his online bio, and has a podcast about special operations forces. On the Instagram for that podcast, and on his own Instagram feed, Ralston frequently uses QAnon hashtags, promotes Q videos, and posts about his interest in killing pedophiles. (Although opposition to pedophilia is an overwhelmingly popular sentiment across political parties, QAnon turns the concern into a bogus call to arms against Trump’s foes.)

Some of the Instagram memes specifically frame elite military as a force for “Q,” the anonymous forum poster behind the conspiracy theory. One typical example, a picture that calls special operatives “the teeth of the light,” promises that thousands of specially trained veterans are willing to use their skills if QAnon’s claims are validated. “If any of the claims prove accurate, justice will be served one way or the other,” the caption reads, in part. “We don’t forgive. We don’t forget.”

Ralston’s special forces podcast has also devoted at least one recent episode to QAnon.

“If these people aren’t brought to justice, there’s gonna be some fuckin’ street justice doled out,” he says while petting a dachshund in a teaser trailer for the episode, uploaded to Instagram.

Ralston, who has not been accused of any conspiracy-related violence, told The Daily Beast he was unsure of QAnon’s popularity with former SEALs or any other group, and declined to otherwise comment for this story.

Attacks by conspiratorial veterans have long been lethal. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people, was carried out by veteran Tim McVeigh, who was steeped in anti-government theories and reportedly told people the Army had implanted him with a microchip. McVeigh’s own failure to join the Army’s special ops forces was reportedly a major factor in his anger, and he viewed himself as a kind of one-man operator. (“In his mind, much of his life has been one of thinking that he is in a kind of Special Forces of his own,” a law enforcement source told The Washington Post after the attack.)

Several recent violent plots associated with the anti-government Boogaloo movement have also allegedly been carried out by veterans or active service members. In May, two veterans and a current Army Reserve soldier were arrested in an alleged plot to throw explosives at a Black Lives Matter rally. That same month, a current Air Force staff sergeant was arrested for allegedly killing a federal security officer and attempting to kill another, in an apparent plot to kick off a new civil war that Boogaloo adherents believe is imminent.

QAnon has inspired its own wave of crimes, with the FBI labeling the movement as a terror threat. Some prominent QAnon personalities are not veterans, but pose as elite Defense Department operatives, including one man linked to several recent Q-inspired kidnappings, who poses as the head of the fictional Pentagon Pedophile Task Force, The Daily Beast reported.

QAnon support extends to at least one SEAL-founded company.Project Warpath is a clothing line owned by Tej Gill, a former member of SEAL Team Five who made headlines for selling “Hillary Clinton Killed My Friends” T-shirts after the deadly 2012 attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya. Project Warpath also posts QAnon content to Instagram, including a recent post falsely linking the debunked Wayfair conspiracy (a QAnon-adjacent theory that falsely claimed children were being sold inside furniture on the home decor site) to Soros and the Clintons. Gill, who has not been accused of any conspiracy-related violence, could not be reached for comment for this story.

Argentino said QAnon’s popularity with special ops veterans might initially seem perplexing. Believers claim Q is a high-level military official. But as veterans of military intelligence circles should know, Q’s muddled posts do not operate anything like military work. (One former QAnon believer whose father had worked for the CIA previously told The Daily Beast she’d abandoned the theory when she realized Q was artlessly aping military language, in a way no service member would.)

A gray-bearded SEAL Team Five veteran, [Clark] Impastato served until recently as a police officer in Phoenix, Arizona, where he fatally shot a 15-year-old accused of making a drug deal.]

Yet elements of QAnon might be alluring to veterans, Argentino noted.

“QAnon is rooted in this war narrative, in the sense that they’re in an information war against the ‘Deep State,’” he said. “Information wars are typically combined with a more physical element ... [Veterans] may want to be called upon to free the children from the pedophiles.”

Some conspiratorial ex-SEAL content is compatible with QAnon, but it’s unclear whether those former SEALs are aware of its full connotations.

One former member of the elite SEAL Team Six recently shared a post falsely linking Black Lives Matter to the Palestinian militant movement Hamas. The ex-SEAL appears to have copy-pasted the post’s caption, which was full of Q hashtags, although he did not write them himself. “Thoughts on this? I am only sharing, so don’t start throwing a tantrum,” he asked his followers.

[The Disturbing Appeal of Boogaloo Violence to Military Men

OUTSIDE AGITATORS

Kelly Weill]

Mitch Aguiar, another former member of SEAL Team Five, has since left the military and gone on to build a name for himself as an MMA fighter and a salesman of military-themed apparel. Like some of his fellow brothers-in-arms,he’s also shared conspiratorial content on his 133,000-follower Instagram, including a post about the death of a QAnon supporter, but used a “PizzaGate” hashtag.(The Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed prominent Democrats were engaging in sex trafficking in a D.C. pizzeria, was a predecessor to QAnon, but fell out of favor after a Pizzagater shot up the restaurant. Another man set fire to the restaurant two years later, in January 2019.)

Aguiar also commented “he’s a pedo” on a fellow ex-SEAL’s meme that falsely claimed actorTom Hanks was wearing an ankle monitor, presumably because a secret court had found him guilty of child sex-trafficking. (This did not happen.)

The fellow ex-SEAL, podcaster Clark Impastato, regularly shares QAnon-flavored conspiracy memes on his Instagram, where he has more than 87,000 followers. A gray-bearded SEAL Team Five veteran, Impastato served until recently as a police officer in Phoenix, Arizona, where he fatally shot a 15-year-old accused of making a drug deal. Although the teen was unarmed, Impastato’s use of force was found to be justified, because the teen rushed Impastato, “pulling his previously concealed hand from his waistband and forming it into a fist with a single, hooked finger extended,” as if to imply holding a gun, according to court records.

Impastato voluntarily relinquished his police certification in January 2016, after racking up multiple misconduct complaints, state records show. Among them are two civil rights misconduct complaints, which state records describe as excessive force, one of them for allegedly punching a suspect. Another misconduct complaint against Impastato is for alleged “dishonesty/false statements” during the hiring process because he “did not disclose past sales of marijuana.” It was not immediately apparent from police records whether the complaints had been substantiated by police, and Phoenix Police did not return multiple requests for comment. In an interview with a military-themed energy drink company, Impastato said he left the force to become an entrepreneur on his own beard-care line.

As protests broke out over the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis in late May, Impastato posted a picture of himself carrying a gun with the caption, “The current chaos makes me wish I was still in to help out. ???????? I’m with you in spirit BROTHERS and SISTERS..” He also posted several memes about killing anti-fascists, including one about the movement coming to the suburbs “so I can get a stateside kill.”

Neither Aguiar nor Impastato have been accused of conspiracy-related violence, and neither returned requests for comment for this story.

The extent of these ex-SEALs’ commitment to the QAnon cause, even when they flirt with it, isn’t always clear.

Increasingly, QAnon belief exists on a spectrum. Where once the theory appealed mostly to a core group of diehards who waited for the next “Q drop” (posts on a forum by an anonymous person claiming to be military intelligence), a diluted version of the conspiracy has reached a broader audience with less absurd claims about pedophilia.

As The New York Times noted last week, QAnon content has recently surged in popularity with a broader crowd, including those who are unaware of its core claims, because it attached itself to a campaign to “save the children.”

Well-intentioned fears can have counterproductive results. Sensationalized fears about Wayfair can obscure the reality that many (nearly half, per one study) of trafficked children are exploited by relatives. And the sudden popularity of sex-trafficking conspiracy theories has overwhelmed legitimate anti-trafficking organizations with bogus complaints. In late July, the National Human Trafficking Hotline released a statement saying “the extreme volume of these contacts has made it more difficult for the Trafficking Hotline to provide support and attention to others who are in need of help.”

Some ex-SEALs operate in the murky area of Q-ish talk about sex-trafficking, conflating real cases with bogus statistics and linking their theories to high-profile celebrities and politicians, usually on the left.

Craig Sawyer, a Texas-based former SEAL Team Six member, runs an anti-trafficking group, and produced a documentary about child sex-trafficking. The group is distinct from theories like QAnon. Some QAnon believers, including the person pretending to be a member of the fictional Pentagon Pedophile Task Force, have targeted Sawyer, falsely accusing him of trafficking. Sawyer has even been openly critical of Q on Twitter, although not of all its claims.

“I’m not big on q, mainly due to how scary some of the followers are in their cult follower tendencies of an entity they can’t vet,” he tweeted in June. “But as long as the q narrative is ‘Do your own research’ & the info is accurate, that’s a good thing.”

Nevertheless, Sawyer frequently interacts with pro-Q personalities, and shares a wealth of Q-adjacent material, including a conspiracy meme about figures like Bill Gates and George Soros pursuing a number of fantastical aims like population control and “one world government.” (He shared the meme, asking followers’ opinion on it, without explicitly endorsing it.) Sawyer, who has not been accused of conspiracy-related violence and declined to comment, shared a picture last Tuesday night of Sen. Kamala Harris posing with Soros’s son.

[Navy SEAL Promoted After Choking Green Beret to Death

WTFO

Kevin Maurer]

The post, about Harris being named Joe Biden’s vice-presidential pick, referred to a sexist conspiracy theory about her. “We now know who’s on team New World Order / Global Marxism,” Sawyer wrote. “Literally GOOD vs EVIL.”

Argentino, who recently authored a scholarly article about QAnon’s potential as a national security threat, said while most violent incidents carried out in the theory’s name were done so by people in a state of crisis, calls by military types are acting as a steady drumbeat.

“People who are ex-military say, ‘I’m going to go liberate the kids,’” he said. “Is it bravado or is it a legitimate call to action?”

For his part, Garrick Fernbaugh’s primary preoccupation has appeared to be theories about anti-fascists. But after years of posting about his interest in hurting them, someone appears to have attempted just that in Portland—while Fernbaugh was very nearby.

Approximately three weeks before the pipe bomb incident, Fernbaugh contacted Sawyer about his interest in anti-fascists. On LinkedIn, Sawyer had authored a post defending the federal agents who notoriously pulled Portland protesters into unmarked vans earlier this summer.

“I think this is actually a very calm & gracious response in the face of such destructive terrorism funded by our nation’s subversive enemies,” Sawyer wrote. “Law & order must prevail??”

Fernbaugh replied in the comments. “I infiltrated ANTIFA in downtown PDX 3 nights ago,” he wrote. “(Dudes in camo) Hit me up, I’ll throw on my Cryes [a brand of combat apparel] and give you a hand restoring law and order, then we’ll go grab a well deserved beer!”

With reporting by Adam Rawnsley

Kelly Weill

Reporter

kelly.weill@thedailybeast.com

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/**the-disturbing-appeal-of-boogaloo-violence-to-military-men

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the fringe movement is the latest in a long series of paramilitary scenes to court U.S. soldiers.

Kelly Weill

Reporter

Updated Jun. 08, 2020 9:14AM ET / Published Jun. 08, 2020

A decade ago, Stephen Parshall served in the Navy as an aviation mechanic. His four-year stateside stint earned him the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, standard fare for members of the Armed Forces supporting the sprawling conflict that began in September 2001.

On May 30, Parshall and two other men were arrested for allegedly plotting several attacks on protests, government facilities, and electrical infrastructure. His alleged accomplices were also current or former military members. According to prosecutors, the three were drawn together by the Boogaloo, an emerging, violent ideology that’s gaining popularity among some troops and veterans.

Fantasies of a violent tipping point feature prominently in the Boogaloo scene, which—while relatively new and not an ideological monolith—generally trends right-wing or fringe libertarian, with many of its memes and aesthetic markers borrowed from more explicitly racist alt-right and 4chan culture. The movement is broadly anti-government, and talks often of sparking a civil war.

[3 Men Tried to Hijack Floyd Protest to Spark Bloodshed: Feds

OUTSIDE AGITATORS

Blake Montgomery

Right-Wing ‘Race War’ Wannabes May Make Protests Go Nuclear

ULTERIOR MOTIVES?

Kelly Weill]

In the midst of that are current and former service members talking about waging war on U.S. soil. Participation by military members in an anti-government movement might seem counterintuitive on its face, but the Boogaloo movement is only the latest in a long series of fringe paramilitary scenes that court American troops.

Parshall, 35; Andrew Lynam, 23; and William Loomis, 40, were arrested at a Black Lives Matter protest in Las Vegas. But the trio weren’t there to protest the death of George Floyd, prosecutors say. Instead, they allegedly planned to throw Molotov cocktails and incite violence, in the hopes of sparking greater unrest.

Their Las Vegas cell came under investigation in April, when one of Parshall and Lynam’s associates contacted the FBI about what that person claimed was the two men’s interest in conducting a terror attack, prosecutors said.The person agreed to become a confidential informant in the group, and gathered with members as they allegedly discussed plots to commit violence and overthrow the government.

The trio allegedly went heavily armed to a “re-open” rally in Las Vegas—one of the largely conservative protests attended by people who wanted to end COVID-19 business closures. There, they allegedly talked of targeting government infrastructure, like a ranger station at a nearby lake.

During later meetings, they allegedly planned to blow up a power station and throw smoke bombs at a different re-open protest. (They allegedly went to the protest but got cold feet when they saw cops watching them.) Finally, on May 30, they allegedly attended the Black Lives Matter protest with Molotov cocktails [COOCH ANNOUNCEMENT] and a plot to spark chaos. The FBI arrested all three on the spot.

The Boogaloo crowd’s intense focus on weapons and training requires the ability to talk the talk—there is a huge amount of jargon in the gun groups...]

The trio’s arrest contributed to growing scrutiny of the Boogaloo movement, as well as the military records of many therein. Parshall was a former Navy seaman, achieving the rank of E-3 during his 2007-2011 service.Lynam is currently a Private First Class in the U.S. Army Reserve,where he is a health-care specialist, an Army spokesperson told The Daily Beast. The spokesperson added that the Army Reserve “is committed to serving the people of the United States, and living the Army values. [Lynam’s] alleged actions are in direct contrast to these values and they are not representative of America's Army Reserve.”

Loomis was an Air Force veteran. Although details on his dates of service and rank were not immediately available, he pleaded guilty to a traffic violation while living on the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska in 2001, records show. Attorneys for Parshall and Loomis did not return a request for comment, and it was unclear if Lynam had retained a lawyer. The Department of Defense did not return a request for comment on how it was handling the Boogaloo movement among troops.

Megan Squire, an Elon University professor researching far-right extremism online, said that, among members of the armed forces, she has noticed a higher rate of Boogaloo participation than in other right-wing movements like the alt-right.

Some of that might be due to fewer Boogaloo participants hiding their involvement, due to the movement’s less explicit messaging, Squire noted. “But a bigger reason might be that theBoogaloo crowd’s intense focus on weapons and training requires the ability to talk the talk—there is a huge amount of jargon in the gun groups—and those with military training are therefore more respected and quicker tohit the ground running with anecdotes, familiarity with weapons, understanding of training protocols, and so on.”

A report by the disinformation-tracking group Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) in February described the military community as a potentially hot recruitment ground for the Boogaloo movement.

“The military community, in particular, may merit special consideration in risk evaluation and social-climate research because seditious memes are now tailored for infection among veterans and active service members,” researchers wrote.

At its most basic level, Boogaloo is an internet joke, onto which followers have grafted a still-solidifying ideology.Mike Harts, an Army veteran and Boogaloo adherent who spoke to the Associated Press last month, described it as a meme that evolved into a movement. That meme has racist roots, with much of the “Boogaloo” language emerging in extremist Telegrams, the Southern Poverty Law Center noted last week, even though “at times, members of online boogaloo communities have presented their political project as race-blind and, in some instances, actively express solidarity with the black freedom movement.”

The joke-y meme language can conceal some of the movement’s true intentions. Members sometimes show up at protests bearing AR-15 rifles and wearing Hawaiian shirts—simultaneously serious and difficult to take seriously.

Much of the movement’s appearance is borrowed from 4chan culture and previous far-right communities. The movement has many of its origins in 4chan’s “/k/” weapons board, a Bellingcat investigation noted last month, andmany Boogaloo-friendly Facebook groups incorporate “/k/” into their names. Fluency in 4chan-style memes gives the movement common ground with alt-right types who popularized those memes from around 2015 to 2017. And Boogaloo members’ military-style riffs on those memes may make them appealing to service members, bringing troops and veterans into conversation with far-right culture.

Seditious memes are now tailored for infection among veterans and active service members...

The end result is something like a military-looking arm patch with a Pepe meme and the words “Boogaloo Boys, Memetic Warfare, 1st [Division],” which members of the movement wore to a pro-gun rally in Virginia in January.

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The NCRI noted that “memetic warfare is still very much a mystery to both policy makers and officials working within the American law enforcement community. In this ignorance, the worst actors amongst Boogaloo groups possess a distinct advantage over government officials and law enforcement: They already realize that they are at war.”

Parshall was apparently familiar with ironic alt-right culture. In 2015, he set his profile picture to a swastika on a gay pride flag, surrounded by Stars of David. (Two days earlier, his profile picture had been a Confederate flag.)

As the Boogaloo movement emerged, some of its earliest advocates were military members. The NCRI identified one of the movement’s early surges as a November standoff between an Army veteran and a police officer, during which the veteran name-checked the Boogaloo. The veteran’s pro-gun Instagram account“only held several thousand followers at the start of the event, it boasted over 130,000 by the time the standoff ended,” the NCRI noted.

During the January pro-gun rally, Boogaloo members associated with the group that wore the “Boogaloo Boys, Memetic Warfare” patch claimed to be active-duty military. “Some of the guys we were with aren’t exactly out of the military yet, so they had to keep their faces covered,” a member of the cell said on a podcast, the NCRI noted.

Army veteran Bradley Bunn, who was arrested May 1 for an alleged plot to throw pipe bombs at a re-open protest, did not appear to be an explicit Boogaloo adherent. But he had associates in the movement and became a hero among some Boogaloo followers, RawStory previously reported.

Despite—or even because of—members’ military ties, the Boogaloo movement seems to have a genuine skepticism of police.

“The military or ex-military guys that I have observed in these communities are proud of having done their service but also frustrated with what they perceive to be ineffective policies and hierarchy,” Squire, the Elon University professor said. “More significantly, all the Boogaloo adherents are intensely anti-police (this is a foundational tenet), and the military-affiliated guys are constantly talking about how inept the police are. They express feelings of frustration for having to be subject to police that they feel are over-militarized and under-trained.”

The military-affiliated guys are constantly talking about how inept the police are...]

The Boogaloo is far from the first civil war-thirsty movement to recruit military members. After the Vietnam War, the white power movement swelled with former soldiers, some of whom had been radicalized by racial conflict in their units or who blamed their military loss on the government.

In her book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, historian Kathleen Belew writes that existing white power groups and publications solicited returning soldiers to stamp out what those groups saw as looming threats of progressivism and racial diversity.

Many Boogaloo Bois deny being racist, or even far-right. Some characterize themselves as libertarians, which, while a break from the standard Republican party line, is not a guarantee against holding far-right views. (When the alt-right movement was in a similarly adolescent stage, jokes about the “libertarian-to-alt-right pipeline” became so popular that alt-righters made a Facebook page of that name.)

But heavily armed and calling for civil war, with one foot in 4chan memes and the other in the military, the group could be an ascendant threat.

Loomis, the oldest of the three men arrested in the Las Vegas bust, apparently associated himself with multiple paramilitary groups prior to the Boogaloo, but could never find one that would bomb anything.

“Loomis stated that he wanted the group to take action against the United States government,” the criminal complaint reads. “Loomis stated that he was previously part of several militia groups, but ultimately left due to inactivity

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Suspect in Santa Cruz ambush linked to federal officer killing in Oakland; charged with 19 felonies

Suspect was a sergeant in the U.S. Air Force

By NATE GARTRELL | ngartrell@bayareanewsgroup.com and JULIA PRODIS SULEK | jsulek@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group

PUBLISHED: June 11, 2020 at 10:12 a.m. | UPDATED: June 12, 2020

A U.S. Air Force sergeant accused of ambushing Santa Cruz County deputies is also believed to be the gunman who shot a federal officer in Oakland, a law enforcement source confirmed Thursday, linking the extraordinary tragedies that may have been spurred in part by extremist, anti-law enforcement views found in the dark corners of social media.

The explosive claim connecting the cases comes the same day that Steven Carrillo, 32, was charged with 19 felonies, including murder, attempted murder, explosives charges and carjacking after the deadly rampage Saturday afternoon that terrorized the mountain community of Ben Lomond, where Carrillo grew up and lived with his father.

‘I became unreasonable’: Bloody message scrawled on car at Ben Lomond ambush]

In a 14-page criminal complaint filed in Santa Cruz County Superior Court, Carrillo — who was on active duty at Travis Air Force Base — was charged with murder in the death of Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller and with the attempted murder of Deputy Alex Spencer, who was critically injured and remains hospitalized. They had been responding to a call from a concerned citizen in nearby Boulder Creek who reported seeing firearms and explosives in Carrillo’s white van.

In all, Carrillo was charged on Thursday with assaulting a firefighter and trying to kill three other law enforcement officers, as well as the resident who ultimately pinned him to the ground as he tried to steal the man’s car during a desperate run from police. The charges include special circumstances of lying in wait, which makes Carrillo eligible for the death penalty, though prosecutors have not said if they will pursue death.

His first court appearance in that case will be a Friday afternoon arraignment in front of Judge Paul Burdick.

The complaint does not mention the Oakland case nor Carrillo’s increasingly hostile anti-government social media posts that alarmed Facebook friends. And it remains unclear why an active duty Air Force sergeant would target members of federal and local law enforcement.

“The link to the Oakland murder doesn’t necessarily surprise me,” said Troy Hunter, a Silicon Valley software engineer who was one of Carrillo’s alleged carjacking victims in Ben Lomond on Saturday.Hunter thwarted Carrillo’s getaway when he removed the keys from the ignition and ran. “It’s more surprising that this guy being an active Air Force member would go down that route. It’s absolutely a little alarming.”

A memorial to fallen Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Deputy Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller in front of Sheriff Headquarters is filled with flowers on Sunday as more than 1,000 mourners attend a vigil for Gutzwiller, who was killed in Ben Lomond in the line of duty on Saturday. (Shmuel Thaler — Santa Cruz Sentinel)

As the country grapples with the Black Lives Matter protests and police use of rubber bullets and tear gas, the rampage in Ben Lomond and the killing in Oakland of a federal officer, who was black, further entangle any notion of clear left and right political battle lines.

A former friend of Carrillo’s — Justin Ehrhardt, who served in the Air Force with him before retiring — said Carrillo’s Facebook posts point to a right-wing extremist group that includes former and active military members. In particular, Carrillo was sharing memes about the so-called “Boogaloo” movement that considers itself a libertarian anti-government citizen militia that is preparing for the next American civil war. Last week, the FBI arrested three adherents to the Boogaloo movement in Nevada, charging them with inciting violence with Molotov cocktails and other explosives at protests over the death of George Floyd.

Carrillo considered himself a libertarian, Ehrhardt said, speculating that police use of force during the protests may have pushed him over the edge.

“Excessive use of force on unarmed civilians — that was a huge thing for him,” Ehrhardt said. “It was a mental tipping point for him.” Ehrhardt imagined it was Carrillo’s way of saying, “If I’m going to fight for something, it’s going to be against the establishment.”

According to the complaint, Carrillo killed Gutzwiller while “lying in wait” for officers on Saturday afternoon at his Ben Lomond home and opened fire and lobbed pipe bombs before stealing one vehicle and attempting to carjack several others. Carrillo ultimately was wrestled to the ground by a nearby, unnamed resident whom Santa Cruz Sheriff Jim Hart praised for a “remarkable, heroic” act.

Carrillo also is charged with the attempted murder of that resident, who Hart said knocked away a pipe bomb and firearm as he grappled with Carrillo before officers arrived.

On Thursday, a source close to the investigation confirmed Carrillo is also believed to be behind the May 29 Oakland shooting that claimed the life of Federal Protective Services officer Dave Patrick Underwood. Underwood had been patrolling the federal building in Oakland blocks from a protest as tens of thousands of people took to the streets in cities across the country after the Minneapolis police killing of Floyd.

Federal prosecutors are reviewing the Oakland case and are expected to make a filing decision in coming days.

Angela Underwood Jacobs gives her opening statement 10 June, 2020 during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC of the House Judiciary Committee about policing practices and law enforcement accountability prompted by the death of George Floyd while in police custody. (Photo by MICHAEL REYNOLDS / POOL / AFP) (Photo by MICHAEL REYNOLDS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) ]

In testimony before a congressional panel on Wednesday, Underwood’s sister, Angela Underwood-Jacobs, said her heartbreak and grief are unexplainable.

“My brother wore a uniform, and he wore that uniform proudly. I’m wondering, where is the outrage for a fallen officer that also happens to be African American?” Jacobs told the House Judiciary Committee. “I truly hope that you take your positions, your offices so seriously that you want to go back and really work together and collaborate, because if you can’t get it right, there’s no hope for the rest of us.”

Carrillo had been living with his father in Ben Lomond over the two years since his wife, who was also in the Air Force, died by suicide while in South Carolina on a training program. He has been a member of a security squadron at Travis Air Force Base since 2018.

Carrillo has two school-age children who are living with his late wife’s parents.

Gutzwiller, the officer Carrillo is charged with killing, left behind a pregnant wife and young child.More than a thousand people turned out the day after his death for a vigil, and while it was clear that the case had national political overtones, the tragedy was deeply personal for this local community.

“There’s a hole in all of our hearts now,” Hart said.

Staff Writer John Woolfolk contributed to this report.

Nate Gartrell | Contra Costa County courts reporter

Nate Gartrell covers crime and corruption in Contra Costa County. He joined the Bay Area News Group in 2014.

Julia Prodis Sulek | Enterprise reporter

Julia Prodis Sulek has been a general assignment reporter for the Bay Area News Group, based in San Jose, her hometown, since the late 1990s. She has covered everything from plane crashes to presidential campaigns, murder trials to immigration debates. Her specialty is narrative storytelling.