The leader of the Oath Keepers militia, Stewart Rhodes, must stay behind bars pending trial for his alleged role in the storming of the Capitol, a judge ruled on Jan. 26, 2022. While this means authorities can keep tabs on the whereabouts of Rhodes – and presumably limit any perceived threat from him – the same may not be said for all members of the group.

Rhodes and other defendants who have pleaded not guilty to charges of seditious conspiracy over the attempted insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, present just a fraction of the total membership of the Oath Keepers – the size of which raises uncomfortable questions about the possibility of violent radicalization in the U.S. military.

As experts on violent extremism, we believe it isn’t only the number of Oath Keepers that is a problem, it is their makeup. A significant number of their members are veterans – both female and male – who bring military skills to the group and also serve as recruiters for other active and former armed service personnel.

Challenging the commander in chief

The Oath Keepers were founded by Rhodes in 2009 as an anti-government group in response to the Obama presidency.

The group’s name implies a mandate to honor their oath to the U.S. Constitution, and in particular to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

But its founding inspiration was precisely the opposite: challenging a legitimate president and commander in chief out of animosity toward what Barack Obama stood for. Since then, the Oath Keepers have armed and broadcast plans to mobilize.

The Oath Keepers may number in the thousands, yet we believe they present a greater threat than their membership suggests. This is partly because the Oath Keepers actively recruit current and retired members of the armed forces.

As UMass Lowell terrorism expert and our research collaborator, Arie Perliger, has shown in his work, Oath Keepers members are likely better trained militarily than other extremist groups because of the group’s composition.

About 10% of the Oath Keepers are active-duty military, and around two-thirds are retired military or law enforcement, according to analysis of the group’s membership by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Several Oath Keepers present at the Jan. 6 attack were veterans, such as Larry Brock, the so-called “zip-tie guy” due to his being photographed with the makeshift handcuffs.

According to an analysis of court and Pentagon records by CNN, as many as 14% of those charged with crimes related to storming the Capitol served in the military. This is double the proportion of veterans in the general American adult population.

Military members are desirable to extremist groups because they bring special skills such as experience with weapons, targeting and combat experience. According to the indictment, the Oath Keepers used a “stack,” or staggered military formation, to breach the Capitol.

As our previous research demonstrated, the processes of radicalization in an extremist group movement is in many ways similar to military training. Those with military backgrounds possess not only the skills that radical groups seek, but also the psychological readiness for violent conflict that is rare among civilians.

The rise in radicalization within the ranks of the military can be observed in the increasing proportion of domestic terrorism acts in the U.S. involving active-duty and reserve personel, from 0% in 2018 to 1.5% in 2019 and 6.4% in 2020, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The number of Americans with military ties classified as extremists quadrupled in recent years, according to Michael Jensen and other researchers at the University of Maryland’s Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism center.

Recruiting ground

An increase in radical ideology among members of the U.S. military makes it a fertile ground for recruiting by groups such as the Oath Keepers.

A 2019 poll of active-duty troops found that around 1 in 3 (36%) reported personally witnessing “White nationalism and ideologically-driven racism” among their peers. This included the use of racist language, but also swastikas drawn on service members’ cars and stickers supporting the Ku Klux Klan.

This high proportion reflects a significant increase from the previous year: In a 2018 poll, 1 in 5 (22%) active military troops had reported witnessing such behavior.

Why it matters

As well as posing a risk due to their weapons training, active and former military personnel pose a greater threat as members of right-wing militia groups. Unlike civilians, military people must take an oath, pledging allegiance to their country and the institutions of democracy enshrined in the Constitution.

When they align with groups like the Oath Keepers and plan an attack on the U.S. government, these military personnel betray their oath. This kind of hypocrisy is known in psychology as cognitive dissonance – an uncomfortable psychological state that arises when one’s actions contradict one’s self-image, causing a motivation to “double-down” to justify one’s actions. It is the reason that painful, embarrassing or humiliating initiation rites are often effective in radicalizing new members. The additional psychological cost of cognitive dissonance may mean military members of the Oath Keepers are more committed to their new allegiance after they turn away from their old one.

While the Oath Keepers wish to present themselves as the ultimate masculine alphas, some of the real power lies with the women supporting their efforts.

The number of men arrested over the Jan. 6 riot outnumber that of women. Of the 11 charged with seditious conspiracy, only one – Jessica Watkins, a former army ranger who at the time of the attack identified as an Oath Keeper – is a woman.

However, women play key support roles from behind the scenes, raising money, disseminating propaganda and even recruiting new members.

After Rhodes was arrested, Kellye SoRelle, a former attorney, was named as “acting president” of the Oath Keepers.

The hidden face of extremism is often female, as our previous research on the subject has shown. In Jihadi groups, women were crucial for fundraising, disseminating propaganda and recruiting men for the cause. Women in Jihadi organizations, like al-Qaeda recruiter Malika el Aroud, were able to shame men into participating in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On her website, minbar.sos, Aroud exhorted men to step up to prove that they were real men.

We see comparable dynamics in American right-wing extremist groups and the ways in which women weaponize toxic masculinity.

Some analysts have predicted that membership in the Oath Keepers will decline as a result of the indictments.

But those indicted number a only a few; the real concern is that the men and women who make up the Oath Keepers’ rank and file could continue to recruit while the leaders remain behind bars.

[Understand key political developments, each week. Subscribe to The Conversation’s politics newsletter.]

Mia Bloom, Professor and fellow at Evidence Based Cyber Security Program, GSU, Georgia State University and Sophia Moskalenko, Research Fellow in Social Psychology, Georgia State University

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

( Tomdispatch.com ) – A relative of mine, who works for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) compiling data on foreigners entering the United States, recently posted a curious logo on his Facebook profile: a white Roman numeral three on a black background surrounded by 13 white stars. For those who don’t know what this symbol stands for, it represents the “Three Percenters,” a group that the Anti-Defamation League has identified as an anti-government militia. Its members have a record of violent criminal attacks and strikingly partisan activity, including arrests and guilty pleas in connection with the bombing of a Minnesota mosque in 2017 and appearances as “guards,” carrying assault-style weaponry, at several pro-Trump rallies. Six of its members have been charged with plotting to assault the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

When my husband, a Naval officer of nearly 20 years, saw this symbol on a family member’s Facebook page, he pointed out to me that, despite the Hatch Act, created to ensure nonpartisanship among federal workers, DHS employees are not always held accountable for exercising “free speech” that would violate that law. The Three Percenters claim that they’re protesting government tyranny. The roman numeral itself refers to a debunked claim that only 3% of Americans in the original 13 colonies took up arms against the British in the Revolutionary War.

What does it mean that an employee of the Department of — yes! — Homeland Security can openly and proudly promote a homegrown militia whose members have threatened and attacked American lawmakers and police? Sadly enough, this fits all too well an agency that national security expert Erik Dahl of the Costs of War Project recently described as looking the other way in the face of rising far-right extremism. That includes anti-government, white-supremacist, and anti-Semitic groups, armed and otherwise. Such right-wing militias and extremist outfits, as Dahl makes clear, have killed an increasing number of people in this country since the 9/11 attacks, significantly more than groups inspired by foreign Islamist organizations like al-Qaeda. And yet, in both its public statements and policies, the domestic agency created after the 9/11 attacks to keep this country “secure” has consistently focused on the latter, while underestimating and often ignoring the former.

How U.S. Security Changed after 9/11

The Department of Homeland Security was quite literally a product of 9/11 and so was formed in a political climate of nearly unwavering support for anything Congress or the White House proposed to combat extremist violence. It officially arrived on the scene just weeks after the 9/11 attacks as the “Office of Homeland Security” when President George W. Bush appointed former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge as its first director. By 2002, now a “department,” it would bring together 22 different government agencies, including the Transportation and Security Administration, Customs and Border Protection, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Its mission, as stated in a proposal by President Bush, was to “protect our homeland… against invisible enemies that can strike with a wide variety of weapons.” In the end, that new department would represent the largest reorganization of government since World War II. Though few here think of it that way, it would prove to be a second Pentagon and, over the years, would be funded in a similarly profligate fashion.

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Under such circumstances, you won’t be surprised to learn that its creation also led to a striking amount of redundancy in the national security establishment. In 2004, Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to provide the president with an overview of all intelligence efforts. According to Dahl, the director of national intelligence and the organizations he or she oversees are supposed to stand on the front lines of combating violent attacks on U.S. soil. Law enforcement groups like the Joint Terrorism Task Forces (under the FBI) have, in fact, thwarted the largest number of potential terrorist attacks since 9/11 and, at the moment, seem to be focused on the most significant threats to this country, which are all too internal. For example, a January 2022 joint statement by senior FBI and Justice Department officials warned that “the threat posed by domestic violent extremism and hate crimes is on the rise” and that FBI investigations of suspected domestic violent extremists have more than doubled since the spring of 2020.

In February 2020, even Christopher Wray, President Trump’s FBI director, testified before the House Judiciary Committee that violent extremists targeting people based on their race or ethnicity “were the primary source of ideologically-motivated lethal incidents and violence in 2018 and 2019, and have been considered the most lethal of all domestic extremist movements since 2001.” Of the 16 (unsuccessful) terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in 2020, 14 were prevented by police or most often FBI agents or those from Joint Terrorism Task Forces. For example, in March 2020, the FBI shot and killed a man in Missouri while attempting to arrest him. He was under investigation for planning to bomb a hospital to protest his city’s Covid-19 lockdown measures.

To be sure, there have also been threats from foreign terrorist organizations and those who act at their behest. Take, for example, the December 6, 2019, attack of a Saudi-born military trainee directed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He managed to kill three sailors at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida. According to Dahl, since 9/11, there have been 146 thwarted attacks planned by foreign terrorist groups or those inspired by them here. The vast majority were prevented by law enforcement sting operations or tips from the public.

Meanwhile, DHS is often not focused on threats of violence at all, but on responding to allegations of mistreatment by its own officers toward people in their custody or toward one another. A list of 2019 and 2020 congressional testimony by DHS officials typically included topics like monitoring reports on terrible conditions in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities, on the mistreatment and deaths of immigrant children in Customs and Border Patrol custody, or on harassment and bullying within the Coast Guard.

When it came to terrorism, prior to the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, DHS officials were primarily focused on their roles as gatekeepers for those entering or traveling within the U.S. In testimony they gave, there was no mention at all about the rise of domestic extremists and the risk they might pose to American lives and property. Typically, in public remarks at American University in March 2019, then DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen stated that Islamist militants pose the primary terrorist threat to the U.S.

On January 5, the day before the Capitol uprising, DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis published a summary account that oh-so-presciently stated: “Nothing significant to report.” Never mind that law enforcement figures had recently been sharing numerous tips on the subject of domestic terrorism, including from soon-to-be protesters exchanging maps of the Capitol’s interior on social media.

Dangers Ahead

While some amount of redundancy is certainly to be expected in government, the level introduced by the Department of Homeland Security should raise issues that go beyond the logistical problem of too many cooks in the kitchen. After all, what does it say about a department created to make this country more secure that just about all those “cooks” focus on only one potential danger, while ignoring the main and all-too-obvious “security” threat to American lives right now?

It’s simple really. Though the word in its name is “homeland,” as in “domestic,” its focus is almost solely on those who come from outside our borders, both jihadist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS that might indeed plot to launch or at least promote terror attacks here and — a particular emphasis of the Trump years — immigrants illegally crossing our border with Mexico.

Even more sinister, when it comes to redundancy, our government now has a second armed entity that can direct its force in an arbitrary way. Twenty years after the 9/11 attacks, the forever-war and new-Cold-War-focused Pentagon is, of course, staggeringly over-funded, even if its rank and file are — take my word for it as a military spouse — ever more depleted from our endless wars abroad, the pandemic ravaging this country, and relentless training. Meanwhile, since 9/11, we’ve overfunded what quickly became a second Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, capable of focusing on whatever it considers to be most politically expedient.

During the Trump administration, DHS suppressed those populations the president and his advisers deemed the greatest threats to this country, even if that meant young children whose families were seized at the southern border. No less chillingly, during the Trump presidency, DHS Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli acknowledged that the agency had sent its employees to monitor and suppress protests in Portland, Oregon, against the police killing of George Floyd. DHS officers began patrolling that city’s streets in unmarked vehicles and detaining protesters allegedly without even telling them why in order, according to Cuccinelli, to “move them to a safe location for questioning.” However, a November 2020 report issued by the DHS’s own inspector general concluded that the people deployed to Portland had no authority (or training) to act as law enforcement officers and had engaged in unconstitutional, violent attacks on protesters, journalists, members of watchdog groups, and bystanders.

All of this should be a reminder of what life in another Trump (or Trumpist) presidency in these (dis)United States could be like for a DHS that already ignores the real potential terrorists in this country. Count on one thing: any regard for civil liberties and human rights would undoubtedly go out the window.

If such a president were to use the bully pulpit to denigrate anyone who disagreed with him or whose way of life differed from his own, then imagine what a Department of Homeland Security that, even now, ignores the deepest security threat to this country, might be like. In a New Yorker article in 2020, journalist Masha Gessen pointed out that “homeland” was, from the start, “an anxious, combative word: it denotes a place under assault, in need of aggressive defense from shape-shifting dangers.” She argued that its sudden use by our government, post-9/11, suggested a move from defending ourselves against other militaries towards defending ourselves against individuals who might, in the end, threaten a leader’s power. And this, Gessen pointed out, is the premise on which secret police forces are built.

Before entering the mental-health field, I spent years living and working as an activist in Russia. Its Federal Security Service, or FSB, has used intimidation, detention without charge, and extra-judicial execution to show everyone from opposition figures to feminist rock bands the might of President Vladimir Putin. Its focus has been on keeping people from challenging the status quo of a patriarchal nation expected to show unquestioning loyalty to its strongman ruler.

The terror that many Russians feel about their internal police is, of course, rooted in history. The FSB’s predecessor, the Soviet Union’s notorious KGB, wielded similar violence against many whose free expression was deemed to threaten state power. Most friends and acquaintances of mine in Russia have relatives in older generations who were taken away, never to be seen again, for reasons as subjective as publishing a poem or talking to the wrong neighbor on the street.

As I reflect on how far state oppression can go, I only hope that the U.S. will never again see a leader who allows federal power to be used in such an arbitrary way. Yet, thanks in part to the Department of Homeland Security, I’m all too aware that this country is remarkably well set up for just such a figure.

National (In)Security?

It should be baffling to us all that the organization tasked with protecting our homeland was unable to avert the most threatening violent attack on our democratically elected government since Confederate troops advanced on Washington, late in the Civil War.

A friend and Park Police officer who was stationed at the Capitol on January 6th recalls being more scared than she had ever been in her 20 years of service. She and some 150 colleagues who specialize in crowd control around national infrastructure lacked a memorandum of understanding with the Capitol Police that would have allowed them to help defend Congress. She said that, as far as she could see, January 6th was a failure of leadership more than anything else because capable people had not been given permission to act.

If we and our lawmakers don’t hold the Department of Homeland Security — a creation of this country’s disastrous war on terror — to account for its actions (or lack of them) and question not just what it does but why it even exists, then I fear for our future. After all, what 9/11 really left us with was not just those destroyed towers in New York and a damaged Pentagon, but our own second Pentagon, a “defense” department capable of being aimed in the worst way possible at the American people. The problem is that the enemy of the future for DHS may very well be the American people — and not just the terrorists among us either.

And, in truth, none of us should be surprised. After all, the original proposal for that agency called for the targeting of invisible enemies capable of striking the “homeland.” In other words, the enemy could be anyone. It could, in fact, be the Department of Homeland Security. And that should concern us all.

Copyright 2022 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

The group was founded in 2009 in the wake of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency and comprises far right wing conspiracy theorists. It is led by the terrifyingly looney Rhodes. The Southern Poverty Law Center writes, “In 2014, Rhodes claimed the group had an unlikely 35,000 dues-paying members who are said to be mostly, although not exclusively, current and former military, law enforcement and emergency first responders.” Some Oath Keepers hold, or are running for, elective office.

Leader Rhodes said things after Biden’s win like ““This is a military invasion by the cartels and a political coup by the domestic Marxist controlled left, which sees open borders and mass-illegal invasion as their ticket to permanent illegitimate political power.”

Note how corporate Democrats like Joe Biden are misidentified as Marxists (!) and this left wing conspiracy is connected to immigration law. Note that Trump did not change immigration law one iota and millions of people immigrated into the US on his watch. This is just white supremacy dressed up as right wing outrage. In 2016, Rhodes had added to his heady mix of imaginary Marxists and menacing immigrant hordes a putative “Islamic” threat of terrorism that would collaborate with the Latino organization La Raza and with the Black Lives Matter movement. Somehow he held that the late Republican Sen. John McCain was orchestrating these sinister forces, and in 2015 Rhodes advocated hanging him.

Despite the group’s pose as a defender of the constitution against what they call “Islamic terrorism,” they are just a homegrown American version of al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda hijacked planes with which to attack government buildings in Washington, D.C.

The Oath Keepers planned to use boats on the Potomac to ferry over heavy weaponry with which to do the same thing.

Al-Qaeda saw the US government as a conspiracy to impose a left-liberal democratic order on people, whereas they wanted a government reflective of their ethnic and religious nativism.

The Oath Keepers agree after their own manner.

Al-Qaeda was xenophobic and did not want American Jews and Christians in the Middle East.

The Oath Keepers are xenophobic and don’t want immigrants in the U.S.

Al-Qaeda was fascinated with military training and with weaponry, and were willing to use these against innocent civilians.

The Oath Keepers also armed and trained themselves and were planning attacks on civilian lawmakers.

Al-Qaeda killed twenty-nine people inside the Pentagon with Flight 77 (plus 64 passengers) on 9/11.

The Capitol insurrectionists were responsible for the death of Iraq War vet and Capitol policeman Brian Sicknick, whom they assaulted and sprayed with bear spray, and who died of stroke. They were also responsible for driving 4 members of the Capitol police to suicide.

In fact, the Oath Keepers came much closer to disrupting the workings of the US government than al-Qaeda did.

By the way, the al-Qaeda cell around the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar `Abdel Rahman, who plotted and carried out the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, were also charged with seditious conspiracy, and the government won its case.

The DOJ Indictment alleged that

“Rhodes and certain co-conspirators, to include selected regional leaders, planned to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power by January 20, 2021, which included multiple ways to deploy force. They coordinated travel across the country to enter Washington, D.C., equipped themselves with a variety of weapons, donned combat and tactical ger, and were prepared to answer Rhodes’s call to take up arms at Rhodes’s direction. Som co-conspirators also amassed firearms on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., distributed them among “quick reaction force (“QRF”) teams, and planned to use firerms in support of their plot to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power.”

Although CBS News editors circulated a memo instructing their reporters not to call January 6 an “insurrection,” it seems clear that that is exactly what it was. Why is CBS running interference for these terrorists?

The DOJ complaint says that the insurrectionists invaded the outer part of the Capitol at 2 pm on Jan. 6, and that “at that time, Rhodes entered the restricted area of the Capitol grounds and directed his followers to meet him at the Capitol.”

Then Oath Keeper fascist brown shirts marched up the east steps of the Capitol in “stack” formation. Stack One joined an angry mob, some of whom assaulted police officers shouting “take their shields” and “Our house!” At 2:38, the indictment says, the doors were breached and Stack One advanced into the Capitol with the crowd. Stack One then split up, one group heading for the Senate Chamber, where they ran up against stiff resistance from the Capitol police. Unable to break into the Senate, they regrouped and left the building. The other half of Stack One attempted to find Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives, but failed to do so and left.

Another formation of Oath Keepers constituted Stack Two and forced their way into the Rotunda. They again ran into a forceful response from the police.

Still others were waiting outside Washington, DC, having formed Quick Reaction Force teams.

After Joe Biden was elected president, Rhodes messaged his group on the Signal app, “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war. Too late for that. Prepare your mind, body, spirit.” He later said that they should emulate Serbs who rose up when Slobodan Melosevic “stole their election” [ in October 2000].

As his buddies in Florida were undergoing training in “unconventional warfare,” Rhodes later texted his group that if President Biden took office, “It wil be a bloody and desperate fight. We are going to have a fight. That can’t be avoided.”

On Dec. 22, 2020, Rhodes said in an interview with a local Oath Keepers leader that if Biden came to power “We will have to do a bloody, massively bloody revolution against them. That’s what’s going to have to happen.” He also urged Trump to deploy the US military to halt the transfer of power.

Rhodes said he wanted to “scare the shit out of” congressional representatives and frighten them into decertifying Biden. Rhodes then bought a weapon sight and night-vision goggles for $7,000 and sent them to a contact near Washington, D.C., suggesting he had some night-time sniping in mind.

Some conspirators said they planned to bring weapons (“long rifles, some sidearms”), others said they would depend on the quick reaction teams to bring them in from 10 minutes outside the city at the right time. One of them, Caldwell, proposed using a boat on the Potomac to bring the “heavy weapons” over.

Rhodes seems to have spent $20,000 on weaponry and ammunition for the operation. On the morning of January 6, Oath Keeper leaders spoke of “armed conflict” and “guerrilla war.”

After their plot to find Vice President Pence, Speaker Pelosi, and other representatives and Senators failed, the Oath Keepers continued to conspire to return the next morning, or in subsequent weeks. Rhodes bought another $15,000 or so of weaponry and sights. They seem to have wanted to stop the inauguration on January 20, but could not find a way to do so. The inauguration was small and very well guarded, but if it had been a traditional sort of event, it looks as though the Oath Keepers would have tried to shoot it up.

January 6 and its aftermath clearly could have been far more bloody if the Capitol police and then the Secret Service had not done such a good job of protecting elected officials from these heavily armed and militarily trained wack jobs. It should be remembered how the odious Trump cultivated these right-wing militias, and told a similar group to “stand back and stand by” during his debate with Joe Biden. They stood by all right.

Published in Foreign Policy No. 156 (Sep. – Oct., 2006), pp. 26-28, 30, 32. Copyright Foreign Policy, all rights reserved. Not for further reprint.

These responses were my assessment of 9/11 and the Bush Forever Wars five years after the attacks. It is perhaps worth revisiting them now, 20 years after the attacks. I think I mostly got it right. I pointed out the US had not refashioned Iraq and Afghanistan but just continued the civil war in both countries by backing the previously weaker side. I pointed out that in many ways 9/11 had also been a disaster for al-Qaeda. I pointed to the future threat of cyber-terrorism. One thing that I would like to underline to today’s readers is that the things I said here in fall, 2006, were extremely controversial and would have been angrily denounced by everyone in official Washington. After you read it, you can see what Bush was telling people around the same time here. Because I said these things I was widely and viciously attacked by the right wing in the U.S., who deluged my university administration for years with demands that I be fired; I was subject to an illegal and outrageous investigation of my private life by the CIA; and I was turned down for a job at Yale (which they had asked me to apply for!). As all Wolverines know, the University of Michigan is in any case the best university in the world, and I was always unlikely to leave Ann Arbor. I say all this not in any search for sympathy; I am aware of my privilege. I say it because much of what I said here later on became common wisdom, and I just want to underline how unusual these views were at that time. In fact, it was brave of Foreign Policy to print them; the Bushies and Neoconservatives were vindictive.

9/11 Was a Victory for Al Qaeda

Only somewhat. The operation was certainly a tour de force of large-scale, theatrical terrorism. But did it really advance the goals of the organization? As a result of the attacks, al Qaeda lost its bases and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. Some al Qaeda strategists had wanted to expand the Taliban’s rule from Afghanistan to neighboring countries, including Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and eventually Pakistan. Instead, the movement’s leaders were forced to either flee overseas or take refuge in a remote network of caves. Military strikes and intelligence operations have disrupted the organization, and hundreds of key operatives have been arrested in Pakistan. Intercepted correspondence and Internet postings reveal that some al Qaeda operatives are bitter toward Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for incurring the full wrath of the United States. Although al Qaeda as a movement or franchise may have benefited from the successes of the Iraqi insurgency, al Qaeda’s leadership did not anticipate the Iraq war. The organization has capitalized on the fighting to further its message and recruiting, but the war was not part of its overarching strategy.

Small Attacks by Local Cells Have Replaced 9/11 -Style Operations

Probably. Post-9/11 terrorism — from Bali to Madrid to London — has become the province of small, local groups who are emulating al Qaeda but not in direct contact with it. These cells can learn a few tricks on the Internet, and they can certainly inflict pain, but they cannot hope to accomplish much. At most, they can carry bombs onto trains. The economic and social disruption of these operations is limited, which is why al Qaeda itself would not bother with them. The core al Qaeda leadership prefers terrorism that has a powerful psychological and political impact. Attaining that level of impact has now become very difficult. The 9/11 hijackers exploited conceptual gaps in U.S. security procedures: American experts did not expect hijackers to be capable of piloting jetliners, and they did not expect them to commit suicide. It would be very difficult to accomplish such an advanced operation again. The organization’s command and control has been severely disrupted, and security agencies around the world are watchful. But al Qaeda is not out of the game entirely. In February 2006, its operatives almost succeeded in bombing the Abqaiq oil refining facility in Saudi Arabia, which would have caused an enormous short term spike in the price of petroleum and widespread fuel shortages. But the fact that a once porous Saudi security apparatus foiled the attack highlights al Qaeda’s limited capabilities.

9/11 Was a Clash of Civilizations

False. The notion that Muslims hate the West for its way of life is simply wrong, and 9/11 hasn’t changed that. The exhaustive World Values Survey found that more than 90 percent of respondents in much of the Muslim world endorsed democracy as the best form of government. Polling by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has found that about half of respondents in countries such as Turkey and Morocco believe that if a Muslim immigrated to the United States, his or her life would be better. The one area where Muslim publics admit to a value difference with the United States and Europe is standards of sexual conduct and, in particular, acceptance of homosexuality. In other words, Muslims reject what might be called Hollywood morality, just as do American conservatives and evangelicals. Those differences alone do not drive people to violence.

If it is not a clash of civilizations, what is it?

It is a clash over policy. Bin Laden has expressed outrage at the occupation of the three holy cities — Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem- – by the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia (now ended) and the Israeli possession of Jerusalem. Before the Iraq war, polling consistently showed that Muslims were most concerned about the United States’ wholehearted support of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. The bloody U.S. occupation of Iraq has now created another point of tension: The Muslim world does not believe that Iraq will be better off because of the U.S. intervention. Autonomy and national independence appear to be part of what Muslims mean by democracy, and they consider Western interventions in Muslim affairs a betrayal of democratic ideals. September 11 and the American response to it have deepened the rift over policy, but they haven’t created a clash of civilizations.

The War on Terror Has no End

That’s the plan. The Bush administration has defined the struggle vaguely precisely so that it can’t end; George W. Bush clearly enjoys the prerogatives of being a war president. So, the administration has expanded the goals and targets of this war from one group or geographical area to another. There is an ongoing counterterrorism effort against al Qaeda and, more broadly, the Salafist jihadi strain of Sunni radicalism. Then there is the struggle to empower the Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and to crush permanently the Pashtun-centered Taliban. In Iraq, the goal is to ensure the primacy of the Kurds and the Shiites over the Sunni Arabs. And then there is the effort to contain or overthrow the secular Baathist regime in Syria and the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran. Even North Korea sometimes gets included in this sprawling campaign. It is less a coherent war than a hawk’s wish list.If the war on terror is indeed all these things, then it could drag on for decades. More likely, the American public will not tolerate such a costly grab bag of initiatives for much longer. If there is no major attack in the United States, pressure will build on Washington to stop fiddling with the politics of Kandahar and Ramadi, much less those of Damascus and Tehran. At some point, the American public will have to choose between paying for Bush’s ongoing wars and Medicare.And that will be the true end of the war on terror.

9/11 Radically Changed U.S. Foreign Policy

No. American policy has changed only at the margins. The attacks temporarily removed constraints on U.S. political elites, allowing them to pursue their policies more aggressively. As we now know, President Bush and his advisors wanted to undermine Saddam’s regime well before September 11. Absent the attacks, the administration might have employed a limited bombing campaign, a covert operation, or a coup attempt. The attacks suddenly made a years long land war in the Middle East politically palatable. But that energy has now dissipated, and it has left behind little fundamental change in U.S. policy.Despite talk of a war on terror, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, the Persian Gulf monarchies, Morocco,and Pakistan remain close U.S. allies. Relations with Libya were warming in the Clinton era, and the Iraq war didn’t alter its trajectory. American support for Israel remains steadfast. And Iran and Syria were in Washington’s sights well before 9/11.It is possible to imagine a response to 9/11 that would have been dramatically different. The United States might have allied with the Baathist secularists in Syria and Iraq, and with the Shiites in Iran, to counter the extremist Sunni threat. Instead, all Washington’s old friends in the area (including the three regimes that had recognized the Taliban — Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) are still friends, and the old enemies are still enemies. The most dramatic changes, of course, are in Afghanistan and Iraq. But both countries have effectively been fighting civil wars for 25 years, with the United States backing the losing side (the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and the Kurds and Shiites in Iraq). After 9/11, the Bush administration transformed the losers in those conflicts into winners. But the civil wars continue, with the unseated groups now playing the role of insurgents. The change is significant, but the transformation is far less complete than what was imagined in the spring of 2003. The administration’s plan for liberalization and democratization in the Middle East has yielded little beyond a failed state in Iraq, an unstable Lebanon torn between Hezbollah and Israel, and polite but noncommittal noises from allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The Next 9/11 Will Be Even Worse

It’s anyone’s guess. Al Qaeda’s efforts to acquire nuclear material have been amateurish. In 2002, U.S. agents in Afghanistan seized canisters from Taliban and al Qaeda compounds, only to discover that al Qaeda operatives had likely been duped into purchasing phony nuclear materials. The organization has pursued other tools of mass destruction, but without much success. Al Qaeda agents were reportedly planning to use poison gas in New York’s subway system, though it appears that Zawahiri mysteriously called off the operation. Perhaps the experience of the Aum Shinrikyo terrorist group in Tokyo deterred him; its 1995 attack killed 12 people rather than the thousands the terrorists had hoped to claim. Still, it would be irresponsible to minimize the threat. Technological advances are allowing small groups to wreak major damage, and al Qaeda has often attracted skilled engineers and scientists. Breakthroughs in DNA research, for example, could lead to designer viruses that would be a terrorist’s dream. The Internet has created new vulnerabilities as major engineering infrastructure, from dams to nuclear plants, has come to rely on it. The world’s financial systems are increasingly vulnerable as well. Governments, universities, and corporations must ensure that emerging technologies don’t go astray. Al Qaeda may not have fundamentally changed the world on 9/11, but that is no reason to give it a second chance.

Want to Know More?

1 For a discussion of the roots of 9/11 and insight into what makes militants tick, see Fawaz Gerges’s The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (Orlando: Harcourt, 2006). Noted Islam scholar Gilles Kepel examines the politics behind radical Islam in Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon speculate on what the next 9/11 might look like in The Next Attack:The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right (New York: Times Books, 2005). FOREIGN POLICY and the Center for American Progress surveyed more than 100 leading foreign-policy experts about the prospects for America’s war against terror in The Terrorism Index (FOREIGN POLICY,July/August 2006). Richard Clarke offers an insider’s look at the U.S. government’s struggle to adapt to the world of global terrorism in Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004). The 911 Commission Report (New York: Norton, 2004) examines the attack in minute detail, assesses the policy failures that made it possible, and suggests reforms to prevent it from happening again.

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Bonus Video:

9/11: One Day In America | Documentary Series Trailer | National Geographic UK

( Otherwords.org ) – You can’t poke into any issue in Congress without stumbling over sacks full of corporate campaign donations. The recent eruption of pro-Trump mob violence inside the U.S. Capitol exposed boodles of that special interest cash to public view.

Much to the embarrassment of major Wall Street banks, Silicon Valley tech giants, and CEOs of brand-name corporations, hundreds of thousands of their political dollars were traced to the mayhem in our Capitol.

Specifically, their money was going into the coffers of 147 Republican lawmakers who backed the fraudulent Trumpster attempt to overthrow last fall’s presidential election.

Acknowledging the damage these revelations did to their public image, the corporate interests responded forcefully. How? They issued press releases condemning violence. Wow… that’ll make things better!

Okay, in fairness, quite a few firms added a bit of bite to their bark by suggesting that maybe they wouldn’t be so cavalier about tossing out political contributions in the future.

Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs announced they would “pause” donations to all candidates. Blue Cross Blue Shield, Marriott, and Dow said they were “suspending” donations to the 147 congress critters who voted to reject the people’s choice. Delta, Fed Ex, and Walmart declared they were “monitoring” the situation.

Notice the profusion of wiggle words in these professions of corporate principle.

The executives are really not biting the system, but merely gumming it for a while. Then, once public attention has drifted, the corporate-congressional complex will be back to business as usual.

After all, while they deplore Trump’s racism, sexism, xenophobia, and overall immorality, they gleefully took it all to the bank, rationalizing, legitimizing — and profiting from — his corrupt presidency.

It’s not armed rioters from outside the system who are the main threat to our democracy, but the insiders who keep manipulating the system to take more money and power at our expense.

Via Otherwords.org

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Thomas Hartmann: “Did Big Oil Fund Trump’s Insurrection? (w/ John Noël)”

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern addressed the nation in the wake of its release. She admitted that security resources was overwhelmingly dedicated to monitoring Muslims, in the absence of any real evidence that the some 50,000 Muslims in the country actually posed any threat. At the same time, white supremacists and other hate groups received relatively little attention. She also noted deficiencies in the firearms licensing system. She affirmed that all those who call New Zealand home should be safe, obviously including the country’s small Muslim minority.

Ardern highlighted the following passage in the report.

“The individual claimed that he was not a frequent commenter on extreme right-wing sites and that YouTube was, for him, a far more significant source of information and inspiration. Although he did frequent extreme right-wing discussion boards such as those on 4chan and 8chan, the evidence we have seen is indicative of more substantial use of YouTube and is therefore consistent with what he told us.”

She said she intended to bring this matter up with Alphabet officials, the parent company of YouTube and Google.

I know it is only anecdotal, but I have noticed that any time YouTube is on auto-play, it fairly quickly goes dark places. You rapidly end up with Alex Jones or some Islamophobic jerk ranting, or a Muslim extremist screed. In fact, I used to turn off autoplay when I embedded YouTube videos here on my site, but then the company took away that option. So my advice is that if you watch a video I choose for you, turn it off quick when it ends.

That there is something sinister about the YouTube algorithm is controversial. A recent paper presented at the Association for Computing Machinery found evidence for the thesis, especially if you look at the viewer comments. Another study at Penn, however, did not find radicalization.

Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:

Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)

In my view, Google saves money by turning key decisions on content over to robots, and this is irresponsible.

The report has other things to say about the perpetrator’s social media habits:

“In 2017, the individual joined The Lads Society’s Facebook group, having changed his username to “Barry Harry Tarry”. Later, he joined The Lads Society Season Two Facebook page, which was a private group. He made his first post on 19 September 2017. He was an active contributor, posting on topics related to issues occurring in Europe, New Zealand and his own life, far right memes, media articles, YouTube links (many of which have since been removed for breaching YouTube’s content agreements), and posts about people who were either for or against his views. He also encouraged others to donate to Martin Sellner, a far right Austrian politician. Two sets of comments warrant particular mention.

In early February 2018, the individual (under the Barry Harry Tarry username) engaged in online discussion with members of The Lads Society Season Two Facebook group about Mein Kampf. In particular, they discussed Hitler’s suggestion that grievance should be the focus of propaganda, “galvanising” those who see themselves as persecuted and “drawing in new sympathisers”. The individual commented:

“Agreed, it is far better to be the oppressed than the oppressor, the defender than the attacker and the political victim rather than the political attacker. Though 1920’s Germany was a very different time to now and we face a very different enemy. Our greatest threat is the non-violent, high fertility, high social cohesion immigrants. They will boil the frogs slowly and by the time our people have enough galvanising force to commit the political and social change necessary for survival, the demographics in my opinion will have shifted so harshly that we would likely never recover . . . What I am saying is that we can’t be a violent group, not now. But without violence I am not certain if there will be any victory possible at all.”

The report notes that his statement “we can’t be a violent group” was made at a time he was already plotting violence, so this phrase was likely intended to throw off any law enforcement officers watching the site.

Facebook has been a major enabler of extremism, and has admitted that the platform was used to incite genocide against the Rohingya Muslims in Buddhist Myanmar (Burma).

Prime Minister Arden and the report both stressed the need to create more social cohesion in New Zealand to to promote tolerance of diversity. It is striking that the Commission report spoke this way:

“At the heart of our inquiry were whānau of the 51 shuhada, and the survivors and witnesses of the terrorist attack and their whānau. Connecting with Muslim communities was an expectation in our Terms of Reference, but it was also the right thing to do. We gained valuable insights in this way.”

This is remarkable diction. Whanau in Maori roughly means kin or extended family, i.e. clan (cognate to ‘ohana in Hawaiian). Shuhada is the Muslim word for “martyrs.” The report begins by seeing the Muslim families in New Zealand as mirroring Maori clans, naturalizing them into the Polynesian country. Then it unselfconsciously incorporates the Muslim community’s own terminology about those killed, as martyrs deserving of paradise who died for their faith. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Maori and Arabic juxtaposed in this way, and it is a language of generous inclusivity.

Of the little over 5 million New Zealanders, nearly half say they have no religion. Some 38% are believing Christians. Hindus comprise 2.7%, Muslims are 1.3% and Buddhists are 1.1%. People following Maori religious and philosophical ideas are also 1.1%. (Most Maoris follow one of two forms of Christianity that are influenced by their Polynesian background). New Zealand was part of the British Empire, which included the Indian subcontinent, so it has a small but significant South Asian immigrant community, and I think most Muslims are of that description. Almost all New Zealanders say they would be OK with living next to someone of a different religion (in the US, large percentages are not all right with this).

The percentage of New Zealanders who practice a non-Christian religion is expected to double by 2050 because of immigration and high birth rates among the immigrants. But I figure that would only take them to 12 percent of the population. And, who knows, the next generation could end up as unchurched as most New Zealanders of Christian heritage.

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Prior to his November 2 shooting rampage in Vienna, Kujtim Fejzullai’s affinity for ISIS was known to Austrian police, given his earlier unsuccessful attempt to cross Turkey’s border to join the ‘caliphate.’ But as far as is known, Fejzullai never actually made contact with ISIS before he swore his allegiance and took out his guns. Rather, he was inspired to violence by the ISIS ideal of global jihad. In other words, he fit the same pattern as Omar Mateen (Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando), Syed Rizwan Farook (San Bernadino shooting), Sayfullo Habibullaevich (Lower Manhatten truck attack) and a host of other jihadi militants: attacks inspired by but with no logistical coordination from ISIS or other global jihadi groups.

Fejzullai’s terror attack epitomizes the fourth wave of global jihad, the idea of nizam, la tanzim (system, not organization) and jihad fardi (personal acts of violence), in the phrasing of ideologue Abu Musab al-Suri. Suri, a committed global jihadi who was arrested in 2005 in Pakistan and handed over to the Americans, had constructed an ideology for 21^st century global jihad, making full use of modern information technologies.

Glenn E. Robinson, Global Jihad: A Brief History , (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2020).[Click]

Modern jihad, he argued, could not rely on old-fashioned organizations, which could so easily be defeated by police, security, and military forces. Rather, it must depend on small scale acts of violence – or irhab, terror, as Suri embraced the word – that rely on modern media to amplify their impacts. Put into contemporary discourse, fourth wave global jihad needed an ever-evolving wiki-narrative constructed by hundreds, even thousands, of jihadi ideologues to weave together many small acts of violence into a fabric of broad, violent, and ultimately effective jihadi resistance.

Violence that is inspired by ISIS (or similar group) but without any logistical or financial connection, is global jihad’s contribution to stochastic terrorism. Ironically, one of the founders of the idea of inspired but logistically unconnected lone wolf attacks, Tom Metzger, died in Southern California two days after Fejzullai’s bloody rampage.

Metzger, Grand Dragon of the KKK and head of the White Aryan Resistance, was one of the first militants to recognize the power of the nascent information revolution to get a message of violence out to millions of followers without ever knowing which of the followers would actually act on that message at any particular point in time. In probabilistic terms, some followers would take up arms, making it a form of stochastic terror (and since such violence almost always targets civilians, it clearly qualifies as terrorism).

Even today, decades after Metzger first envisioned the idea of stochastic terror, followers of white nationalism have perpetrated the most lethal acts of such violence in the west. Recent white nationalist attacks include those by Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo (killed 77) and Brenton Tarrant in Christchurch, New Zealand (killed 51), both of whom claimed inspiration from various Islamophobic authors and, in the case of Tarrant, from Donald Trump as well. The 2017 neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville was similarly inspired by Trump, but he had no known logistical connection to the organizers of the deeply anti-Semitic march. All are examples of stochastic terror.

Indeed, in my recent book Global Jihad: A Brief History (Stanford University Press), I argue that global jihadis share much in common with other extreme movements, both religious and secular, over the past century. Global jihadis, white nationalists, Khmer Rouge, Red Guards, Nazi Brownshirts and a handful of other “movements of rage” share the twin characteristics of nihilistic violence and apocalyptic ideologies. These linked characteristics make movements of rage a unique form of violent socio-political movement.

Nihilistic violence is not meaningless violence (in the philosophical sense of nihilism), but rather root-and-branch system-destroying violence (as adopted by 19^th century Russian anarchists). It is violence that represents the apocalyptic ideologies espoused by adherents of movements of rage, and is fundamentally anti-Enlightenment. While movements of rage are by necessity generally weak and almost never come to power, such groups can be particularly deadly. Among the groups movements of rage frequently attack are the modern educated classes, a trait I refer to as gnosicide – the killing of knowledge or those who possess it, who represent a form of “cultural contamination.”

Global Jihad: A Brief History details all four waves of global jihad in an interpretive history, from the ‘Jihadi International’ first wave seeking to liberate occupied lands, to the “America First” second wave seeking to drive the Americans out of the Middle East and pave the way to overthrowing local ‘apostate’ regimes, to the state-building third wave seeking to eliminate apostasy itself in a puritanical state ruled by sharia. ISIS’s extensive use of “jihadi cool” recruitment techniques is likewise explored. The current fourth wave noted above is also examined, as is the broader comparative framework that links global jihad with similar violent groups over the past century.

Glenn E. Robinson, Global Jihad: A Brief History , (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2020).[Click]

In April 2020, the United Nation’s Secretary-General, António Guterres, addressed members of the Security Council by warning them that the COVID-19 pandemic could threaten global peace and security.

If the health crisis was not managed effectively, he feared that its negative economic consequences, along with a mismanaged government response, would provide an opportunity for white supremacists, right-wing extremists and others to promote division, social unrest and even violence to achieve their objectives.

In early October 2020, less than a month before the United States federal election, the FBI thwarted an alleged terrorism plot by right-wing extremists to kidnap the Michigan governor, storm the state capital building and commit acts of violence against law enforcement.

Their aim, according to court documents, was to start a “civil war leading to societal collapse.” To date, 14 men have been arrested on charges of terrorism and other related crimes. Several of them are linked to the Wolverine Watchmen, a militia-type group in Michigan that espouses anti-government and anti-law enforcement views.

The FBI recently briefed U.S. senators on the evolving concern of domestic violent extremists, groups whose ideological goals to commit violence stem from domestic influences such as social movements like #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and government policies.

The composition of many of these organizations are right-wing terror groups whose grievances are rooted in racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, anti-LGBTQ sentiments, Islamophobia and perceptions of government overreach. Given the wide range of grievances, these groups are defined as being complex, with overlapping viewpoints from similarly minded individuals advocating different but related ideologies.

Toxic masculinity

Feminist researchers believe the rise of disenfranchised middle-class white males is leading to increased toxic masculinity within society, as evidenced by the increased popularity of the so-called manosphere to share extremist ideas and vent their grievances. Law enforcement agencies are concerned that the manosphere and similar online communities are radicalizing young men to commit violence to achieve their goals.

This concern is valid, with plenty of evidence to support it.

According to the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database, there were 310 terrorist attacks resulting in 316 deaths (excluding perpetrators) in the United States alone from 2015 to 2019.

Most were right-wing extremists, including white nationalists and other alt-right movement members. This alt-right movement also contains the incel (involuntary celibate) members who are a growing threat to women.

But the increase in right-wing terrorism is not just a U.S. problem. The UN Security Council’s Counterterrorism Committee says there’s been a 320 per cent increase in right-wing terrorism globally in the five years prior to 2020.

Recent terrorist attacks in New Zealand (2019), Germany (2019) and Norway (2019) are indicators of this trend. The Centre for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo reports that both Spain and Greece are growing hotbeds for right-wing terrorism and violence.

Canada isn’t immune to these violent extremist ideologies. Many sympathizers to these causes reside in Canada, and as such there is always a risk for attacks. But the Canadian government is taking notice and has listed Combat 18 and Blood & Honour as right-wing terrorist organizations.

A major global security threat

Right-wing extremism is of such concern that when the top international security policy-makers met at the 2019 Munich Security Conference, they ranked it among space security, climate security and emerging technologies as the top global security threats.

It would appear as though the world is at the dawn of a new age of terrorism that’s different from before. Famed terrorism researcher David C. Rapoport argued in his influential thesis “The Four Waves of Rebel Terror and September 11” that modern terrorism can be categorized into four distinct waves.

The first “Anarchist Wave” began in the 1880s in Russia with the Narodnaya Volya (“The People’s Will”) conducting assassinations of political leaders. It continued until the 1920s, spreading across the Balkans and eventually into the West, influencing the creation of new terror groups within different countries.

The 1920s saw the beginning of the “Anti-Colonial Wave” coming out of the remnants of the First World War, when groups like the Irish Republican Army (IRA) began using ambush tactics against police and military targets to force political change.

In the 1960s, the “New Left Wave” was created. This third wave emerged from the perceived oppression of Western countries within the developing world (like Vietnam and the Middle East). Its tactics included plane hijackings, embassy attacks and kidnappings perpetrated by groups like the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Finally, the 1990s witnessed the birth of the “Religious Wave” in which terror groups like al-Qaida used religious ideology as a justification to overthrow secular governments with martyrdom tactics like suicide bombings.

What all these waves have in common is that they last for a few decades and become infectious over time, spreading across the globe as new groups learn and adopt the successful tactics of previous ones.

The fifth wave?

This brings us to today’s right-wing terrorism.

Already observers have signalled the decline of violent Islamic movements and the rise of far-right extremist activities. Is right-wing violent extremism the new fifth wave of modern terrorism?

If so, there’s no doubt the negative societal impacts of COVID-19 will only help accelerate the radicalization of its adherents.

And if the duration of the previous four waves have taught us anything, it’s that this new one could be around for many more years to come.

Sean Spence, Doctorate Student – Security Risk Management, University of Portsmouth

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

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CBS News: “Evidence presented in court against alleged Michigan militia members”

Details are still emerging about the men arrested on federal and state charges related to an alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Federal prosecutions can take months and even years, so it will be quite some time before a full analysis of this situation becomes possible.

But as a scholar who has spent the last 12 years studying the U.S. domestic militia movement, including three years of fieldwork embedded with militias in Michigan, I believe several themes will remain important, wherever the details lead.

1. What is this group, and where did it come from?

Reports I’m hearing indicate that the group the arrested men were part of, called the Wolverine Watchmen, likely started early this year as an offshoot of the Michigan Liberty Militia. That group has received wide publicity for its involvement in lockdown protests at the state Capitol in Lansing.

It’s not clear why the split may have happened, but it is very common for internal splits to occur in militia groups. I’ve observed that directly in my fieldwork, and have heard the same from long-term militia members who say it dates back to the beginnings of the movement in the early 1990s.

Sometimes these splits are for practical reasons, like groups that grow too large dividing into smaller groups to allow for more frequent meetings and closer connections. Or people tire of traveling long distances to be part of a large group, and instead start their own unit closer to home.

Other times, splits happen because of personality conflicts or disagreements over the direction of the group. Some members of Michigan’s Hutaree militia, for instance, started as members of a different group, but were pushed out.

The reasons I heard from militia members on both sides of that split were that those who became the Hutaree hinted at having more extreme views than the rest of the group. Leaders of the original group had also expressed concerns about unsafe firearms handling practices among those future Hutaree members, an offense that, if persistent, is grounds for membership revocation in many militias.

The reasons the Wolverines split are not yet clear – but it is possible that they had ideological disagreements.

2. What are their aims or goals?

Traditionally, researchers have categorized militias as one of two general types: “constitutionalists,” who are largely law-abiding and make up the majority of the movement, and “millenarians,” who are more prone to conspiracy theories and violent action.

More recently, internal divisions have occurred in both these groups around whether they support police, or whether they call for a widespread uprising against government tyranny.

From the evidence available so far, it strikes me that the arrested men are probably more millenarian in outlook. In general, millenarian groups are more likely than their constitutionalist comrades to be invested in conspiracy theories, to be motivated by religious and racist views and to have members who are closely related to each other.

These characteristics fit with what is known so far about the men arrested in Michigan, which include two people who share a residence and two others who share a last name. For instance, at least one of them appears to have followed and promoted QAnon, a movement that has been called a “collective delusion” rather than a conspiracy theory. That belief system includes claims that “vaccinations with tracking chips will later be activated by 5G cellular networks,” “the coronavirus is a hoax,” “celebrities harvest [a chemical] from children’s bodies” and that a “global network tortures and sexually abuses children in Satanic rituals,” among other ideas.

A different member of the alleged conspiracy has shared online images of Norse symbols and a religion worshiping the Norse god Odin. These are not inherently racist, but many racists and white supremacists identify with and promote the myths and iconographies of that religion, often called “Odinism.”

Some might suspect that the men were motivated by a desire to overthrow the government – since they allegedly sought to kidnap a governor. But based on the information available so far, including the federal charges against them, I think it is more likely that these men saw themselves as resisting government overreach and infringement on individual liberties, seeking to restore what they understood to be a constitutional leadership structure.

For instance, the federal charging document quotes one of the men as saying “I can see several states taking their … tyrants. Everybody takes their tyrants.”

3. How much of their belief is about gender?

Overt sexism is not usually part of militia groups’ principles, but militias are dominated by men, with most groups having no more than 10% women among their membership. Many of those men believe in largely traditional roles, where men are the protectors and breadwinners of the family, and women take more supporting and child-rearing roles.

Those beliefs can be amplified among people who follow certain versions of Odinism that are connected to white supremacy. From their perspective, It’s a way to increase the numbers of strong white families and white babies.

The document detailing the federal charges says the men used sexist language when discussing the governor, including the word “bitch.” That seems to confirm that their anger may have been sparked not just by Whitmer’s lockdown orders, but also the fact that she’s a woman.

4. Was this influenced by President Donald Trump?

It is impossible to say definitively whether these men were inspired by anything Pres. Donald Trump has said or done.

However, the president has used inflammatory language criticizing Whitmer – including a tweet just two days after a large anti-lockdown protest including armed protesters surrounded the state Capitol building. That tweet, on April 17, 2020, simply declared “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”

Around the same time, Facebook reportedly alerted the FBI to online discussions that related to this group’s alleged plot.

Whitmer herself has said the president’s rhetoric is partially responsible for the plot, including his refusal to denounce white supremacists during the Sept. 29 presidential debate.

In the wake of the arrests, Trump continued to attack Whitmer, saying she had done “a terrible job” battling the coronavirus pandemic and accusing her of not being grateful enough to “My Justice Department” for its work on the case.

5. Were they a serious threat?

As a specialist on Michigan militias, I’ve been asked several times since the news broke whether this group posed a real threat, in terms of being likely to act on its plan and kidnap or harm Gov. Whitmer.

Members of other militia groups in the state reported to me after the arrests that they do not believe these men were “smart enough” to pull off anything like this.

I heard similar comments about the suspected weaknesses of Hutaree members a decade ago. In 2010, nine members of that group, another Michigan militia, were arrested on federal charges that they planned a series of events to kill large numbers of police officers. Those charges were ultimately dismissed by a federal judge who said all they were doing was talking, though a few of the group were convicted of more minor charges involving weapons possession.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

The involvement of informants and undercover agents may also raise concerns about FBI practices, which have been criticized as fabricating entire plots to entrap innocent people in cases that alleged Islamic terrorism.

These are the issues to keep an eye on, as the details emerge and the case unfolds.

Amy Cooter, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Vanderbilt University

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

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CBS News: “New details about plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer”