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5/30/20, 5:45 AMLand of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful

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Home of the hateful, fearful, heavilyarmedDavid Kilcullen May 30, 2020

Protesters in Lansing, Michigan, during a rally earlier this month organised by Michigan United for Liberty to

condemn coronavirus pandemic stay-at-home orders. Picture: AFP

From Inquirer

15 minute read

The rise of militias and armed protesters across the US is sometimes seen

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as a fringe right-wing issue, but it is much broader. Armed groups haveformed across the political spectrum, worsening divisions the coronavirushas exposed in American society.

As I write, there are 1.7 million coronavirus cases in the US and more than100,000 deaths. The little county where I live — only a half-million people, ina part-urban, part-wilderness area of the Rocky Mountains — has a deathtoll higher than Australia and New Zealand combined. And this is one of thesafe places, positively benign compared with hot spots such as New York orNew Jersey with deaths in the tens of thousands.

Second to its health impact, the economic crisis wrought by government-imposed lockdowns has grabbed the most attention: 40 million Americanswere forced on to the dole in the past 10 weeks. The job market, strong untilmid-March, has fallen off a cliff. A flood of bankruptcies is sweeping USbusiness; analysts expect a wave of municipal bankruptcies as tax revenuecollapses. Congress has committed $US2 trillion ($3 trillion) in crisisspending, even as public debt nears $US30 trillion, or roughly 120 per centof gross domestic product. If the first wave of the coronavirus tsunami wasits health effect, the second — economic devastation — may be worse. Butthere is a third wave coming: the possibility of armed conflict towards theend of this year, when the combined health and economic impacts of thecrisis will peak amid the most violently contested presidential election inmemory.

Protesters, some heavily armed, are out in force to demand reopening ofthe economy. The husband of one leader posted a Facebook video thisweek expressing his readiness to take up arms against the government toprevent a “new world order” being imposed through lockdowns.

There were already many militias of varying political complexions across



America — one pro-militia website lists 361 groups across all 50 states.Membership surged after the 2008 financial crisis, then accelerated asthugs from both political extremes fought each other with baseball bats, -bicycle chains and pepper spray in the streets of Washington, DC, Seattle,Portland and Detroit. The deadly “Unite the Right” rally in the normallysleepy university town of Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 broughtthe danger home to many Americans, but the trend was longstanding.

Rioting among groups such as Antifa (on the anarchist left), Patriot Prayerand the Proud Boys (on the alt-right) and mass demonstrations by issue-motivated groups such as Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and theWomen’s March kicked into high gear after Donald Trump’s election.

Far-left militias such as Redneck Revolt and the John Brown Gun Clubemerged, copying the methods and military-style weapons of right-wingmilitias while opposing their politics. Both far-right and far-left armedgroups were at Charlottesville, with cadres of gun-carrying militants

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guarding protesters on both sides and a third-party “constitutionalist”militia, the Oath Keepers — composed mainly of military and law-enforcement veterans — standing by as self-appointed umpires.

In the west, a separate rural militia movement had already coalesced around“sovereign citizen” groups that rejected federal authority. Despite mediaportrayals of its leaders as racially motivated, in fact the sovereign citizenideology is neither left nor right in a traditional sense — it might better bedescribed as a form of militant libertarianism with roots in the self-reliantcowboy culture of the old west. In April 2014, a dispute over grazing rightsin Nevada triggered an armed stand-off between militia and federalagencies including the Bureau of Land Management and the FBI. Thisdispute — over federal attempts to impound the cattle of a rancher namedCliven Bundy — brought hundreds of militia members from across thecountry to Nevada where they surrounded federal agents, trained weaponson them and forced them to back down.

The 2014 stand-off ended in a bloodless militia victory, but almost twoyears later Bundy’s son Ammon led an armed occupation of theheadquarters of a federal wildlife refuge in southeastern Oregon. This time,things went the other way. The occupation prompted a six-week siege byfederal and state agencies in January-February 2016. It resulted in thedeath of LaVoy Finicum, a charismatic Arizona rancher whose killing,captured on government aerial-camera footage that appears to show himwith hands raised in surrender before being shot, made him a martyr.

Though Trump is as much a symptom as a cause of America’s toxicpolarisation, the passions he inspires among friend and foe alike haveexacerbated it: during the 2016 election campaign, Arizona militias mountedarmed patrols to support his border wall. In response, Redneck Revolt helda heavily armed show of force in Phoenix, Arizona, later posting a YouTube



video showing members shooting semiautomatic rifles at targets displayingalt-right symbols. A few months later, Antifa convened an “anti-colonialanti-fascist community defence gathering” near Flagstaff, Arizona, thatincluded weapons training and coaching in anti-police tactics. Today, far-left and far-right groups operate within close striking distance of each otherin several border states and in “contested zones” including the PacificNorthwest, parts of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Carolinas.

A Youtube still of Neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division training outside Seattle.

The pandemic — and the grievances inspired by heavy-handed responsesto it — have brought these tensions to a head. Camouflage-clad militiasporting semiautomatic rifles and body armour and riding in military-surplustrucks joined an armed protest against the governor of Pennsylvania inApril. Similar protests took place in Ohio and North Dakota. A week laterdemonstrators, some carrying AK-47 rifles, swarmed into the state capital inLansing, Michigan, to confront politicians.

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A racial edge also emerged: a week after the Lansing incident a group ofAfrican-Americans, armed with AR-15 rifles and automatic pistols, mounteda show of force outside the Michigan State Capitol building to support ablack member of the legislature. Class inequities, which track closely withracial disparities here, have prompted socialist groups — notably Antifa butalso traditionally nonviolent Trotskyist and anarchist networks — to armthemselves for an incipient revolutionary moment.

Mass protests on the rise

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In Minneapolis, the killing by white police officers of an unarmed black man,George Floyd, brought thousands of protesters on to the streets for several

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nights of rioting, with multiple buildings and cars burned and shoppingmalls and restaurants looted. By Thursday, militarised police were on thestreets firing tear gas and rubber bullets against vociferous opposition. Atleast one person has been killed in the riots and the Minnesota NationalGuard is expected to join the police in attempting to restore order.

Thus, far from being a purely right-wing phenomenon, rifts within USsociety that are most stressed by the coronavirus — urban versus ruralinterests, racial and class tensions, state overreach versus anti-governmentmilitancy, far left against alt-right, “collectivist” coastal elites versus ruggedindividualists in “flyover country” — align with pre-existing grievances. Andheavily armed actors across the spectrum are poised to exploit them.

One reason for the overemphasis on right-wing extremism, I believe, is thatanalysts often mischaracterise armed actors as “hate groups”. It isabsolutely true that the intense hatred from right-wing extremists dwarfsmost other groups. But the focus on hate is a misunderstanding of whatdrives violence in internal conflicts.

As Stathis Kalyvas demonstrated a decade ago in The Logic of Violence inCivil War, the worst atrocities are driven not by hate but by fear. Fear ofother groups, encroachment of those groups into one’s territory andcollapse of confidence in government’s ability to impartially keep the peaceare the key factors that provoke communal violence. Hate follows andrationalises fear, not the other way around. And fear of the coronavirus,alongside the demonstrable inability of government to keep people safe, isdriving today’s growth in armed militancy.

Like Iraq, like Somalia

To me, current conditions feel disturbingly similar to things I have seen inIraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Colombia. Indeed, the theory of guerrilla



and unconventional warfare fits today’s situation all too well.

If we visualise an armed movement as a pyramid, then the thousands ofprotesters on the street (and the tens of thousands who support andsympathise with them but stay home) represent the mass base. A smallergroup of organisers and support networks (physical and virtual) plays anauxiliary role further up the pyramid. The armed, gun-toting element issmaller still, but higher in skill, weaponry, organisation and motivation. It’sworth remembering that almost three million Americans served in Iraq andAfghanistan, coming home familiar with urban and rural guerrilla warfare toa country where 41 per cent of people own a gun or live with someone whodoes.

A militia group with no political affiliation from Michigan stands in front of the Governor’s office after protesters

occupied the state capitol building on April 30.

The US has no national firearms register, so only estimates are possible, butanalysts believe around 100 million firearms are in private hands in the US,

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and hundreds of billions of rounds of ammunition. Given widespread com-bat experience from the war on terror, this reservoir of military potential setsthe US apart from any other Western democracy.

The pandemic has seen a surge in gun purchases, with background checksspiking to their highest number. Many of these are first-time buyers fromthe progressive end of politics, who traditionally shun firearms and havelittle knowledge of weapon safety.

Racial war, class war

More worrying, on left and right, are underground groups including so-called “accelerationists”. These tend to be small, secretive and far moreviolent than the militias or mass movements. They follow a decentralisedcommand-and-control philosophy known as “leaderless resistance” thatwas pioneered by far-right groups in the 1980s but has since been taken upby terrorists across the political spectrum, including jihadists. Their goal isto accelerate the collapse of a social order they see as doomed, by bringingon a racial war, a class war or both.

Underground networks operate using a clandestine cell structure, andcommunicate via the deep web and tools such as Telegram or RocketChat,secure-messaging apps that have become havens for extremists as moreopen channels, including chat rooms such as the neo-Nazi forum IronMarch, have been shut down.

Language policing on social media has not only pushed accelerationistgroups underground; it has created a whole new language.

The term “Boogaloo” is widely used for the coming civil war. Variants —coined to avoid Twitter censors — include “The Big Igloo” or “The BigLuau”, the last explaining why Hawaiian shirts are popular among militias.



Memes from television (“Winter is Coming”, “Cowabunga”) are popular, asare meme-based references such as “Spicy Time” or acronyms such asBAMN (“by any means necessary”) and BFYTW (“because f..k you, that’swhy”). Some call the urban guerrilla aspect of the Boogaloo “Minecrafting”:Twitter threads seeming to discuss the game may actually refer to thecoming conflict — context is everything. Some discussion hides in plainsight on social media: more open, practical and gruesome conversationsare left to the deep web, Telegram or neo-Nazi sites such as Daily Stormer,which resides on the orphaned former Soviet “.su” internet domain as a wayto avoid censorship. Doctoral dissertations could be written on thekaleidoscope of visual symbols used by groups, left and right, to signalallegiances.

Accelerationism has a long history on the Marxist left and amongenvironmental activists such as Earth Liberation Front or Earth First! It hassince been embraced by right-wing extremists including 2019 Christchurchkiller Brenton Tarrant, whose manifesto included environmentalist ideologyand was celebrated by neo-Nazi ecoterrorist group Green Brigade.

Other right-wing accelerationist groups include Atomwaffen Division (whichhas a presence in Australia) and The Base, a white-supremacist groupfounded in mid-2018 whose name is a play on al-Qa’ida (“the base” inArabic). FBI agents targeted The Base after its members allegedly sought toattack a massive pro-gun rally outside the Virginia State Capitol building inRichmond in January. In a classic accelerationist move, they planned toinfiltrate the rally, start shooting both protesters and law enforcementofficers, provoke a massacre and thereby convert a peaceful (albeit armed)demonstration into a militant uprising.



A heavily-armed young man poses for a photo with his assault rifle during the protest at the State Capitol in Salem,

Oregon on May 2.

The group’s leader, until recently known by his nom de guerre “NormanSpear”, was unmasked in January as Rinaldo Nazzaro, a New Jersey nativebased in St Petersburg, Russia, from where he directed cells in Maryland,Delaware and New Jersey. There is no public evidence of any relationshipbetween Nazzaro and Russian intelligence, though his presence in Russiatriggered speculation in the media and within The Base itself. But thishighlights another risk factor for 2020: the possibility of foreign interferenceastride the upcoming presidential election.

A new cold war

The US and China are fast descending into a new cold war, asrecriminations over the pandemic heighten conflicts that were alreadyacute. Each is seeking to improve its military position against the other: theChinese navy has ramped up activity in the South China Sea, for example,

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while US forces mounted more incursions into the area in the past threemonths than in all of last year. China’s history of sponsoring agents ofinfluence in the US and other Western countries (including Australia) and itstrack record of cyber-espionage and technology theft make it a reasonableassumption that some (with or without official backing) may be consideringways to exploit America’s internal tensions. Indeed, it would be intelligencemalpractice if they were not.

Likewise, Iran — which lost Qassem Soleimani, head of its RevolutionaryGuards covert action arm, the Quds Force, to a US drone strike in January— has been on a path of military confrontation with the US for years. A -series of incidents in the Middle East and the increasing pain of USeconomic sanctions motivate Tehran to create internal distractions for theUS, relieving pressure on itself. The regime has a history of sponsoringlethal covert action inside the US — most recently in 2011, when QudsForce members recruited a criminal gang in an attempt to assassinate theSaudi ambassador by bombing an upscale Washington, DC, restaurant.

Again, there is no public evidence of such activity at present, but Iranianoperatives watching the US today would be remiss not to consider it.

If interference does occur, US armed groups probably would not know it.Just as members of The Base were dismayed to discover their leader livingin Russia, militant groups in the US — many of which are patriotic, albeitopposed to the current character of government — would likely spurn anyovert foreign approach. But anonymous funding, amplification of onlinemessaging, offers of training or equipment through “cut-outs” such astactical training companies or non-government organisations, or “false flag”operations (where agents of one organisation pretend to belong to another)would allow hostile foreign actors to inflame tensions.



It is, of course, impossible to say with certainty whether significant violencewill occur this year. All we can conclude from the available evidence is thatthe risk is real and growing. We can also make some judgments aboutwhere and when violence might break out and what form it might take.

Given the pandemic health crisis, widespread economic disruption over thenorthern summer, then a predicted second wave of infection in October-November, peak compound impact — when the combined health, economicand security effects of the coronavirus will be at their worst — will likely runfrom late October until March-April next year, astride the next election andtransition to the next presidential term.

Even without the virus, the election was already set to be a flashpoint; thecombined health, economic and security effects of the pandemic couldmake it far worse. If Trump is re-elected, mass protests are a given, whilefactions within the militant left might undertake what they term “directaction”. As The Base’s targeting of January’s Richmond rally showed, streetprotests are fertile ground for provocations. If Trump is defeated, elementsof the militia movement or street protesters might also engage in violence.

In “contested areas” — where the territories of left and right-wing militantsoverlap — we can expect violence irrespective of the outcome. Whether itspreads will depend on level-headed political leadership — and today’shyper-partisan coronavirus debate offers little hope of that. If violence doesspread, it will not be a re-run of the American Civil War. Rather, given themultiplicity of groups involved, their geographical overlap and loosestructure, we can expect something much more diffuse.

Remember Colombia

Perhaps the best analogy is Colombia, which saw 10 years of amorphousconflict from 1948 to 1958, a decade known as La Violencia. Starting as



rioting in Bogota — driven by pre-existing urban-rural, left-right, class andracial divisions — violence spread to the countryside as the two mainpolitical parties, the Colombian Liberal Party and the Conservative Party,mobilised rural supporters to attack each other’s communities. Localgovernments weaponised police to kill or expel political opponents.Extremists joined in and “conflict entrepreneurs” emerged to prolong andprofit from the violence. In the end 200,000 people were killed, two millionwere displaced and the Colombian Army — after initially staying out of theconflict — eventually stepped in to end the violence, seizing control in acoup in 1953. External actors, including the Cold War superpowers, alsointerfered.

Colombia is not the only precedent. Last month marked the 25thanniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest domestic terroristattack in US history. The bomber, Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh,claimed to be enraged by government overreactions at Ruby Ridge (1992)and Waco, Texas (1993), which between them saw law enforcement kill 78civilians including 26 children. He bombed a building that housed thefederal agencies he blamed, along with a childcare centre. His commentafter his trial — that the 19 children killed, of 168 dead and 680 injured,were “collateral damage” — highlighted his military mindset and intent totrigger an anti-government uprising. There was indeed a huge rise in militiaactivity. But the callousness of McVeigh’s attack made most militiascondemn him, and — by tarnishing the self-perceived righteousness oftheir anti-government cause — undermined the movement he hoped toinspire. He was executed a few months before 9/11.



Protestors try to enter the Michigan House of Representative chamber.

In retrospect, the risk that Ruby Ridge and Waco would trigger a terroristbacklash seems obvious. Analysts warned this year that extremism posesas much risk today as it did in 1995. Ahead of time, McVeigh’s attack wasfar harder to foresee and its specifics impossible to predict. But far from afringe issue of neo-Nazi nut cases, the pandemic has made the risk of -violence in 2020 far more widespread, larger in scale and more militarilyserious than we might imagine. America may well be in a “pre-McVeighmoment”.

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