Panic! in the Discord is teaming up with old friends, John Belushi Antifa and Chicago Anti-Fascist Action plus new comrades Anne Frank Army (their Twitter) and Shield Wall Chicago (their Twitter) for this lightning round of dossier publication. Currently, we’re identifying all the IL militia networks, thanks to a ton of help from a Threeper who “grew a conscious about organizing to murder fellow human beings in the name of Donald Trump.” We salute you tipster! We welcome any new information on the growing armed paramilitary movement. We have dozens of names and will be churning out dossiers in the coming weeks so if you’re on this list or think you’re on this list and would like help leaving the white nationalist/Boog paramilitary/far- or Alt-right/QAnon movement, please don’t hesitate to reach out to panicinthediscord@riseup.net We won’t out you and we won’t charge you any money.
Militia growth has been exponential leading up to and in the aftermath of the US Presidential election. leading to an increase in membership, but the interconnectedness of militia, the military and the far-right cannot be overlooked. As explained in The Nation, “In a country where gun ownership and firearms training are seen by the far right as inalienable, all-American freedoms, the military is a ripe breeding ground for disaffected men looking for individual empowerment, a sense of belonging, and just such training. In fact, a recent New York Times investigation claims that veterans and active-duty military members make up more than a fifth of the membership of America’s 300 anti-government, pro-Trump “militia” groups. According to a 2019 survey by the Military Times, about a quarter of active-duty service members reported witnessing signs of white nationalist ideology among their fellow soldiers, including racist and anti-Semitic slurs and homemade explosives shaped like swastikas…”Let’s remember that this right was grounded in the idea of organizing the revolutionary army against a colonial power that taxed people without representing them and forcibly billeted its military in their homes. The colonists, while rife with their own history of human-rights violations, were not a bunch of disaffected, irrationally angry individual crusaders with an urge to use weapons to threaten civilians.”
It’s also an example of the dangerous feedback loop that occurs when fringe grievances like COVID-19 lockdowns or false stories about voter fraud are amplified by legitimate voices, like elected GOP officials or Fox News, and then fed back into fringe networks like MyMilitia, per Tess Owens in Vice.
The end result of that feedback loop is what we see playing out in The Oath Keepers, (sister militia to the III%ers), “an armed right-wing organisation that boasts tens of thousands of members with law enforcement and military backgrounds, was one of several groups to demonstrate in Washington over the weekend at the “Million MAGA March” in support of Donald Trump, whom news networks project has lost the 2020 election. “I think about half this country won’t recognise Biden as legitimate. They won’t recognise this election,” Stewart Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers, told The Independent on Saturday in the nation’s capital,” as reported in The Independent.
‘“What that means is that everything that comes out of his mouth will be considered not of any force or effect, anything he signs into law we won’t recognise as legitimate. We’ll be very much like the founding fathers. We’ll end up nullifying and resisting,” Mr Rhodes said. Thousands of Trump supporters — including members of far-right groups such as the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Boys, and the Oath Keepers, as well as ordinary American citizens — participated in the march, which was pervaded by a sense that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr Trump,’ also from The Independent.
As explored in Vice, ‘“MyMilitia is like Amazon for people on the fringe,” said Brian Levin, who heads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. “The difference is that people here are armed, and they’re reading Canadian manuals about how to blow up tanks.”’ Later in the article, when discussing people who are opposed to fascism (like white nationalism, white supremacy and other incarnations of the authoritarian movement best known for its genocides in Germany and Chile), people known as antifa, short for antifascists, Levin continues:
This article will shine some sunlight on members from three militias, We The People III% Militia, Illinois Sons of Liberty and the entry pool for My Militia, called “Roll Call.” Names, pictures and residential information will be made available on the following people:
Paul Jepsen, George Mendyk, Michele Gropp,
There will be more articles forthcoming.
