According to a just-released study, the risk of interference in the coming election by far-right “Patriot” militiamen heavily aligned with Donald Trump is not only real, it’s growing intense in over half the states in the nation, with five states in particular likely to see disruptive behavior and perhaps violence: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Oregon.
Compiled by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), the study gathered and examined “the latest data on right-wing militia organizations across the country, identifying the most active groups and mapping the locations most likely to experience heightened militia activity before, during, and after the election.” What it found should send up warning flares to officials at all levels concerned about election security, as well as among law enforcement officers who seem to be currently preoccupied with election-related civic violence coming from the left.
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Already there have been multiple warning signs of trouble ahead, particularly the arrests two weeks ago of 14 militiamen who were plotting to kidnap Michigan’s governor and execute her. The rise of the civil-war-promoting “Boogaloo” movement and its accompanying violence, especially around the civil unrest of the past year, already has domestic terrorism experts seriously concerned. And the shooting of two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, by a teenage militiaman made clear that violence is on their agenda.
The majority of militia organizing ahead of the election has revolved around reactions to the social upheavals of 2020: COVID-19 public health measures around which right-wing protests have been organized, as well as the nationwide protests that erupted after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Much of the rhetoric and organizational energy has derived from the far right’s extreme antagonism of the antifascist movement, which they have successfully constructed as a bogeyman that generally provides a pretext for their own predilection for violence.
The ACLED study, however, is an important one because it quantifies, for the first time, a phenomenon observers in the field have been reporting: Namely, the transformation of the American Patriot militia movement from a generically anti-government, nonpartisan rightist body into a specifically anti-democratic authoritarian bloc aligned entirely with the Republican Party and with Trump in particular, built on a foundation of conspiracy theories and a grotesquely distorted conception of the meaning of “patriotism.” Its conclusion reads:
There has been a major realignment of militia movements in the US from anti-federal government writ large to mostly supporting one candidate, thereby generally positioning the militia movement alongside a political party. This has resulted in the further entrenchment of a connection between these groups’ identities and politics under the Trump administration, with the intention of preserving and promoting a limited and warped understanding of US history and culture.
The study concluded that these militia outfits use “hybrid tactics,” utilizing a deft combination of public relations and propaganda that soft-pedals and defends their own violence while hysterically demonizing their opposition, along with armed paramilitary training for both rural and urban combat. Whereas the Patriot movement of the ‘90s was organized around a resistance to law enforcement, many of them see themselves now as a “supplement” to existing police forces, often peddling themselves as “public protectors”—as occurred when hoax rumors about “antifa buses” invading rural towns, and later setting wildfires along the West Coast, produced hordes of militiamen prowling the streets of those towns, acting as would-be defenders against black-clad leftists.
It also observes that these groups “are often highly competitive with one another”—indeed, their internecine squabbling can be intense and laden with threats of violence. However, the ongoing broader social unrest and “heightened political tension” have created an environment in which those differences are overlooked and smoothed over, resulting in the militias’ coalescence with street-brawling groups such as the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, as well as a number of QAnon-linked groups.
The data collected by ACLED team found that right-wing extremists are organizing around the election in three phases:
- The preelection cycle, when “armed groups may operate in conjunction with the incumbent’s party to repress opposition candidates and supporters. In these spaces, the objective is to alter the narrow margins of victory in favor of ‘their’ candidate.” The study cites how pro-Trump “caravan” rallies have featured open engagement with right-wing extremists, including militiamen, Proud Boys, and white supremacists, such as those in Portland, Oregon, at one of which a Patriot Prayer marcher was killed by an antifascist.
- The main election period, “when armed groups may try to monitor polling centers, potentially stifling voters.” It notes that “the prospect of armed groups showing up to polling centers on Election Day” is already a source of fear and alarm that is being stoked by such far-right groups as the Oath Keepers, where the founder has vowed that militias would “be out on Election Day to protect people who are voting.”
- The post-election period, when “these groups will pivot their focus to vote counts. Activity involving armed groups in such contexts is often pinned to the margins of election results, especially if their preferred candidate does not win.” This scenario essentially would recreate scenes such as the infamous “Brooks Brothers riot” that shut down the vote count in Florida during the contested 2000 presidential election—but this time featuring armed militiamen and polo-clad Proud Boys. As the study notes, the latter group has already asserted that “if Trump doesn't get re-elected … is when you're going to see a civil war.”
Overall, the researchers found that well over half of the nation’s 50 states are at “high risk” of experiencing this kind of activity. Hampton Stall, who oversees MilitiaWatch and who helped compile the study, told Daily Kos: “The reality is that most U.S. states do have increasingly elevated potential for networked right-wing armed violence.”
It found five states—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Oregon—were at the highest risk levels, based largely on ongoing militia organizing there. The next tier included other states facing less severe but still relatively high risk: North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, California, and New Mexico.
The key factors are in play in all of these locations: “substantial engagement in anti-coronavirus lockdown protests as well as places where militias might have perceptions of ‘leftist coup’ activities,” as well as states “where militias have been active in setting up recruitment drives or holding training for members,” and locations “where militia members cultivate personal relationships with police or law enforcement or where there might be a friendly attitude by law enforcement towards militia presence or activity.”
As New York writer Sarah Jones concludes:
Militia groups aren’t just becoming more common and more violent, they’re becoming more acceptable. That has long-term implications for the viability of American democracy. The existence of a heavily armed, deeply paranoid faction does not bode well for future elections, even if Joe Biden defeats Trump in two weeks. The horrors Trump has unleashed may be with us for a long time after he’s gone.