[With the US dangerously divided, experts fear the president’s
remarks will inspire armed factions to show up at polling places ]
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WILL MILITIAS HEED TRUMP'S CALL TO WATCH THE POLLS?  
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Ed Pilkington
October 9, 2020
The Guardian
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_ With the US dangerously divided, experts fear the president’s
remarks will inspire armed factions to show up at polling places _

Donald Trump during the first US presidential debate hosted by Case
Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland,
Ohio, Olivier Douliery/Bloomberg/Getty Images

 

In the final minutes of last week’s televised presidential debate, a
few days before he tested positive for Covid-19, Donald Trump
[[link removed]] was asked by the
moderator, Chris Wallace, whether he would call on his supporters to
stay calm and desist from civil unrest in the immediate aftermath of
next month’s election.

Trump pointedly declined the invitation. Instead, he replied
[[link removed]]: “I’m urging my
supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully, because
that’s what has to happen. I’m urging them to do it.”

For those who monitor the activities of far-right militia groups and
white-supremacist paramilitaries, Trump’s remarks were as welcome as
jet fuel being used to quell a wildfire. Indeed, since they were made
the FBI launched a series of arrests of militia members and others
plotting to kidnap the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and attack
law enforcement, adding to a sense of a nation spiraling out of
control as November’s election approaches.

'We can't let them win': activists warn against Trump's voter
intimidation tactics
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“The militias will absolutely seize on [Trump’s comments],” said
Steven Gardiner, who tracks militias at the progressive
thinktank Political Research Associates
[[link removed]]. “The possibility of armed
factions with military-style rifles showing up at polling places is
very troubling.”

Devin Burghart, the director of the anti-bigotry organization the
Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, had a similar
sinking sensation when he heard Trump’s words. “My first thought
was ‘Here we go’. This is the stuff of our worst nightmares.”

The US president’s clarion call to his supporters to intervene at
polling places on election day comes at a perilous moment. As the
country is battered by the combined winds of the pandemic and
Trump’s personal battle against the virus, the Black Lives Matter
reckoning over racial injustice, and the pending turbulent election,
the US is not only more virulently divided than at any time in
decades, it is also more heavily armed.

FBI background checks – a direct indicator of gun sales –
almost doubled
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this summer, a reflection of the jitters that abound. As America arms
itself, deadly weaponry is increasingly finding its way on to the
streets, borne by self-styled private militias and culminating
[[link removed]] in violent
clashes [[link removed]] that have
caused bloodshed
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several US cities.

[People wait in a line to enter a gun store in Culver City,
California.]
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 People wait in a line to enter a gun store in Culver City,
California. Photograph: Ringo HW Chiu/AP

With the most ferociously-contested presidential election in modern
times now less than a month away, there are signs that heavily-armed
militia groups, many of them finely attuned to Trump’s every whim,
are setting their sights on the ballot.

“A number of groups have begun talking about mobilizations on
election day and beyond. We’re hearing initial chatter about
preparations for 3 November and we’re paying close attention,”
Burghart said.

Burghart’s research group has been tracking the escalation of
militia activity especially in key swing states. In Pennsylvania,
Michigan and Wisconsin in particular, groups have been detected
discussing what they call “voter integrity” efforts on polling
day.

“We anticipate that after Trump’s call to arms at last week’s
debate we’ll see a lot more activity from here,” Burghart said.

Guardian US newsletters for the 2020 election and beyond

In Montana, a popular base for libertarians and militia members, there
are similar signs of militia groups assiduously retweeting Trump’s
falsehoods about mail-in voting fraud, circulating the lies widely
among themselves.

In the closed social media groups and chatrooms where more detailed
conversations can be held away from public oversight, far-right
ideologues are going several steps further than merely repeating
Trump’s conspiracy theories. They are attaching them to familiar
antisemitic and racist tropes.

One popular line in Montana is that the billionaire philanthropist
George Soros, who is Jewish, is using his fortune to encourage liberal
voters to cast their ballots multiple times.

Rachel Carroll Rivas, the co-director of the Montana Human Rights
Network [[link removed]], which monitors
extremist networks in the state, said they were picking up
intensifying conversation among militia groups about the legitimacy of
the 3 November ballot and of the integrity of mail-in voting. “This
really is top down – they are repeating word for word what they hear
from President Trump.”

In addition to the Soros lie, Rivas said, militia groups such as the
Montana branch of the United States Freedom Protectors were
positioning themselves to be vigilante outriders of law enforcement on
election day. Though their planning is as yet relatively unformed,
Rivas said, the possibility of interventions by armed members of the
group had to be taken seriously.

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

Putting a figure on the scale of the threat posed by extremist militia
groups in the US is fraught given their secretive communications
online. The New York Times has estimated
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are up to 20,000 active militia members in about 300 groups, with a
quarter consisting of military veterans.

[A member of the Proud Boys, right, tries to get a counter-protester
to leave a Proud Boys rally in Portland in September.]
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 A member of the Proud Boys, right, tries to get a counter-protester
to leave a Proud Boys rally in Portland in September. Photograph: John
Locher/AP

The pool of Americans with some militia engagement might extend much
wider than that. An investigation by the Atlantic
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the Oath Keepers, one of the most prominent groups, revealed a leaked
database of almost 25,000 current or past members, two-thirds of whom
were from military or law enforcement backgrounds.

Whatever the numbers, white-supremacist militia groups in America have
grown in recent years to the point where they pose the prime domestic
terrorism threat, even while the Trump administration has tried to
play down the danger. Earlier this month a whistleblower complained
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officials of the Department of Homeland Security had been instructed
by superiors to alter intelligence reports to make the peril appear
less severe.

It’s even harder to put a figure on how much Trump has emboldened
the militia, though the encouragement he has given is beyond doubt.
Not only has he consistently refused to condemn the groups, as he did
with the Proud Boys
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last week’s TV debate, but he has maintained a steady dialogue with
them through social media.

“The relationship between the militias and the current
administration is call and response – it’s not always clear
who’s leading the chant. Sometimes it’s coming from the militias,
sometimes it’s coming from the president,” Gardiner said.

It’s not just the rightwing paramilitaries that pose a mounting
danger. Anti-fascist and radical left groups have shown a growing
recourse to guns too, as was seen with the shooting
[[link removed]] by
a self-styled anti-fascist activist, later himself killed by police,
of a member of the pro-Trump group Patriot Prayer in Portland last
month.

The relationship between the militias and the current administration
is call and response
Steven Gardiner

African American armed militia activity is also back to a level of
open defiance that hasn’t been seen since the “cop-watching
patrols” of the Black Panthers in the 1970s. The NFAC (Not Fucking
Around Coalition) has staged several actions by its military veteran
members, dressed all in black and wielding semi-automatic rifles.

On 4 July the coalition staged a parade of about 1,000 NFAC
“troops” in Stone Mountain, Georgia
[[link removed]],
the birthplace of the modern Ku Klux Klan. The group’s leader, Grand
Master Jay, told Channel 4 News this month that the goal of the
militia was “the protection of the black race, the policing of the
black race, the education of weapons of the black race”.

The arming of African American and anti-fascist factions has
contributed to the volatility of the times. But the overwhelming bulk
of militia activity falls firmly on the other side of the country’s
widening racial divide – with the overwhelmingly white far-right.

The summer saw the proliferation of incidents across the states of
far-right militia groups confronting Black Lives Matter protesters.
Gardiner’s team at Political Research Associates has carried out as
yet unpublished research that records almost 600 such appearances of
small but frighteningly well-armed bands of Trump supporters and
far-right extremists.

A troubling aspect of Gardiner’s findings is that since the late
summer there has been a gradual rise in militia events ending in
violence. “The number of serious incidents of outright violence,
shootings, vehicular assaults or menacing with a pointed gun is on the
up,” he said.

An even more sobering observation is that by far the largest subset of
these militia events, comprising at least 40% of the almost 600
recorded total, were uncoordinated, with no known involvement of the
Oath Keepers, Three Percenters
[[link removed]], Proud
Boys, or any other established group.

That means that there have been almost 240 incidents where small and
entirely leaderless bands of extremists coalesced online and then
proceeded to take their armed fantasies on to the streets of America.
One expert on domestic terrorism has likened the phenomenon
to “online flash mobs”
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Take the chain of events that led up to the tragic loss of life in
Kenosha, Wisconsin, on 25 August. Two days previously, protests broke
out in the city after a video captured Jacob Blake, an African
American man, being shot in the back
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paralyzed by a police officer.

On the night of 25 August, several armed individuals formed themselves
into a militia on the streets of Kenosha to act as a vigilante
counter-point to the anti-police brutality demonstrators whom they
denounced as leftist “thugs”. The unrest culminated with a
17-year-old member of the group, Kyle Rittenhouse
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allegedly shooting at protesters, killing two and injuring a third.

An investigation
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the Atlantic Council’s digital forensic research lab traced the
gelling of the militia back to its online roots. They discovered that
13 hours before the shootings a notice calling on people to gather on
the streets of Kenosha was placed on the existing Facebook page of a
local militia calling itself the “Kenosha Guard”.

A second invitation to assemble was put out via a separate Facebook
group that popped up that same day having been created by an
individual with no known militia affiliation. He called the page,
“STAND UP KENOSHA!!!! TONIGHT WE COME TOGETHER”.

Significantly, it was the spontaneous and impromptu group, Stand Up
Kenosha, and not the already established Kenosha Guard militia, that
appeared to have the greatest impact – both in terms of the
virulence of the violent threats that it posted on Facebook and in the
responses it received.

[A so-called militia man shows up on the protester side and offers
armed escorts to a safe position in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August.]
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 A so-called militia man shows up on the protester side and offers
armed escorts to a safe position in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August.
Photograph: Jim Vondruska

Andy Carvin, a senior fellow at Atlantic Council, said that the
finding was surprising, and disturbing. “Stand Up Kenosha played a
much more dangerous and potentially volatile role that could have led
to even more violence. This is the stuff that now keeps me up at
night: these spontaneous groups that have found a way of attracting
individuals who have no prior militia affiliations of any sort.”

The paradox is that under both federal and state laws, militias should
have long ago been prohibited. Mary McCord, the legal director of the
Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, said that the
legal status of the groups is crystal clear – they are unlawful.

“There is nothing in the law that allows private individuals to
self-deploy and engage in military or law enforcement-type
activities,” she said.

At a federal level, US supreme court rulings in 1886 and 2008 have
unambiguously stated that the second amendment right to bear arms is
irrelevant when it comes to banning private paramilitary
organizations. At state level, all 50 states
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provisions in their constitutions or in statute that outlaw militia
activity unless it is at the express orders of the governor.

“This is actually not a grey area at all, you rarely have laws that
are so definitive,” McCord said. “It is only because of a lack of
understanding that these militias even exist.”

In the final weeks of the election, McCord and her colleagues have
been scrambling to distribute fact sheets
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all states that point to the laws prohibiting private militias and
advise what to do should armed groups turn up at polling places. She
is hoping to arm local law enforcement and voters with legal
information so that they can push back on extremists armed with AK-47
style weapons.

It’s a daunting task, made none the easier by Trump. “When he
talks about ‘poll watching’ and fraud, and refuses to urge his
followers not to engage in civil unrest, that’s a thinly-veiled
dog-whistle for armed groups to coalesce.”

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