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A Pro-Trump Militant Group Has Recruited Thousands of Police, Soldiers, and Veterans
Mike Giglio, The Atlantic
Giglio writes: "Stewart Rhodes was living his vision of the future. On television, American cities were burning, while on the internet, rumors warned that antifa bands were coming to terrorize the suburbs. Rhodes was driving around South Texas, getting ready for them. He answered his phone. 'Let's not fuck around,' he said. 'We've descended into civil war.'"
An Atlantic investigation reveals who they are and what they might do on Election Day.
It was a Friday evening in June. Rhodes, 55, is a stocky man with a gray buzz cut, a wardrobe of tactical-casual attire, and a black eye patch. With him in his pickup were a pistol and a dusty black hat with the gold logo of the Oath Keepers, a militant group that has drawn in thousands of people from the military and law-enforcement communities.
Rhodes had been talking about civil war since he founded the Oath Keepers, in 2009. But now more people were listening. And whereas Rhodes had once cast himself as a revolutionary in waiting, he now saw his role as defending the president. He had put out a call for his followers to protect the country against what he was calling an “insurrection.” The unrest, he told me, was the latest attempt to undermine Donald Trump.
Over the summer, Rhodes’s warnings of conflict only grew louder. In August, when a teenager was charged with shooting and killing two people at protests over police brutality in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Rhodes called him “a Hero, a Patriot” on Twitter. And when a Trump supporter was killed later that week in Portland, Oregon, Rhodes declared that there was no going back. “Civil war is here, right now,” he wrote, before being banned from the platform for inciting violence.
By then, I’d spent months interviewing current and former Oath Keepers, attempting to determine whether they would really take part in violence. Many of their worst fears had been realized in quick succession: government lockdowns, riots, a movement to abolish police, and leftist groups arming themselves and seizing part of a city. They saw all of it as a precursor to the 2020 election.
As Trump spent the year warning about voter fraud, the Oath Keepers were listening. What would happen, I wondered, if Trump lost, said the election had been stolen, and refused to concede? Or the flip side: What if he won and his opponents poured into the streets in protest? The U.S. was already seeing a surge in political violence, and in August the FBI put out a bulletin that warned of a possible escalation heading into the election. How much worse would things get if trained professionals took up arms?
I’d been asking a version of these questions since 2017, when I met a researcher from the Southern Poverty Law Center who told me about Rhodes and the Oath Keepers. She’d received a leaked database with information about the group, and she said it might contain some answers.
Rhodes was a little-known libertarian blogger when he launched the Oath Keepers in early 2009. It was a moment of anxiety on the American right: As the Great Recession raged, protesters met the new president with accusations of socialism and tyranny. “The greatest threats to our liberty do not come from without,” Rhodes wrote online, “but from within.” Republicans had spent eight years amassing power in an executive branch now occupied by Barack Obama. The time for politics was ending. “Our would-be slave masters are greatly underestimating the resolve and military capability of the people,” Rhodes wrote.
Rhodes had joined the military just out of high school, hoping to become a Green Beret, but his career was cut short when he fractured his spine during a parachute training jump. After his discharge, he worked as a firearms instructor and parked cars as a valet. In 1993, he dropped a loaded handgun and it shot him in the face, blinding him in his left eye. The brush with death inspired him, at 28, to enroll in community college. He went on to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where he graduated summa cum laude, and then to Yale Law School, where he won a prize for a paper arguing that the Bush administration’s enemy-combatant doctrine violated the Constitution.
He married a fellow libertarian, started a family, and hung out a shingle as a lawyer in Montana—“Ivy League quality … without Ivy League expense,” read a classified ad in 2008. He volunteered for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign that year. But after the election, he veered from politics toward something darker.
His blog post was both a manifesto and a recruiting pitch. He based it on the oath that soldiers take when they enlist—minimizing the vow to obey the president and focusing on the one that comes before it, to “support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Law-enforcement officers swear a similar oath, and Rhodes wrote that both groups could refuse orders, including those related to gun control, that would enable tyranny. And, if necessary, they could fight.
Responses poured in, and Rhodes published them on his blog:
“Your message is spreading and I will make sure it gets to more Marines.”
“Not only will I refuse any unlawful order that violates the Constitution I will fight the tyrants that give the orders. Rest assured that me and my brothers in Law Enforcement talk about this subject on a regular basis.”
“I fully support you and what you stand for and I do talk about these things with some of my subordinates,” an Air Force officer wrote. “Those who I trust that is.”
Rhodes kept the nature of the Oath Keepers ambiguous—the group was officially nonpartisan and was not, as a later post on the blog put it, a militia “per se.” Even so, he cautioned that its members would be painted as extremists and said they could remain anonymous. “We don’t ask current-serving law enforcement and military to sign up on any kind of membership list,” he said in a radio interview. “We think that’d be foolish.”
But eventually he did create such a list. It collected members’ names, home and email addresses, phone numbers, and service histories, along with answers to a question about how they could help the Oath Keepers. Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center passed the entries for nearly 25,000 people along to me.
On April 19, 2009, Rhodes traveled to Lexington Green, in Massachusetts, for the anniversary of the first shots of the American Revolution. Standing before a crowd of new members, he led a reaffirmation of their oaths. With him were two heroes of the militant right: Richard Mack, who popularized the idea that county sheriffs are the highest law in the land, and Mike Vanderboegh, the founder of the Three Percenters, an umbrella militia based on the myth that it took just 3 percent of the population to fight and win the Revolutionary War.
With his Ivy League law degree, Rhodes’s background was unusual. One of the first cases he’d taken on after law school was helping with the pro bono defense of a militia leader jailed for making machine guns. His early writings on his blog, and on a web forum where he used the handle Stewart the Yalie, reveal a fixation on the rise of the hundreds of militia groups that, in the early 1990s, loosely coalesced under the banner of the Patriot movement.
Rhodes was deeply affected by the 1993 government siege outside Waco, Texas, which ended in the deaths of more than 70 members of an armed Christian sect, which to him showed the danger of government power. But the Patriot movement became notorious for its connections to white nationalists—and it fell apart after Timothy McVeigh, who’d attended militia meetings, bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
Rhodes wanted to avoid repeating these earlier groups’ mistakes, and he showed a talent for giving fringe ideas more mainstream appeal. His refusal to call the Oath Keepers a militia helped, as did the fact that he put a disavowal of racism on his blog and warned members not to make overt threats of violence. He insisted that the Oath Keepers would fight only as a last resort.
Rhodes believed that the militia groups of the past had been too secretive, which made the public suspicious and gave authorities more leeway to crack down. He established the Oath Keepers as a registered nonprofit with a board of directors; members did relief work after hurricanes and spoke at local Republican events. They could walk into police stations or stand outside military bases with leaflets; they could meet with sheriffs and petition lawmakers.
Rhodes wrote a creed listing 10 types of orders that members vow to resist. Gun-control laws are first among them. Then come libertarian concerns such as subjecting American citizens to military tribunals and warrantless search and seizure. After those come more conspiratorial fears—blockades of cities, foreign troops on U.S. soil, putting Americans in detention camps. Here Rhodes was drawing from the “New World Order” theory, a worldview that is central to the Patriot movement—and that can be traced back to what the historian Richard Hofstadter, writing in the 1960s, called the paranoid style in American politics. It linked fears of globalism, a deep distrust of elites, and the idea that a ballooning federal government could become tyrannical.
Rhodes appeared on Hardball and The O’Reilly Factor, where his ideas were called dangerous; on conservative talk radio, where they were met more favorably; and on The Alex Jones Show, where he was featured so often that he and Jones became friends. He kept the Oath Keepers at the vanguard of the Patriot movement, which was seeing a resurgence, and traded his blog for a website that sold branded body armor and a Facebook page that reached half a million followers before it was shut down in August.
In Trump, the Patriot movement believed it had an ally in the White House for the first time. In 2016, when Trump had warned of election fraud, Rhodes put out a call for members to quietly monitor polling stations. When Trump warned of an invasion by undocumented immigrants, Rhodes traveled to the southern border with an Oath Keepers patrol. He sent members to “protect” Trump supporters from the protesters at his rallies and appeared in the VIP section at one of them, standing in the front row in a black Oath Keepers shirt. When Trump warned of the potential for civil war at the start of the impeachment inquiry last fall, Rhodes voiced his assent on Twitter. “This is the truth,” he wrote. “This is where we are.”
Even while he courted publicity, Rhodes maintained secrecy around his rank and file. Monitoring groups couldn’t say for sure how many members the Oath Keepers had or what kind of people were joining.
But the leaked database laid everything out. It had been compiled by Rhodes’s deputies as new members signed up at recruiting events or on the Oath Keepers website. They hailed from every state. About two-thirds had a background in the military or law enforcement. About 10 percent of these members were active-duty. There was a sheriff in Colorado, a SWAT-team member in Indiana, a police patrolman in Miami, the chief of a small police department in Illinois. There were members of the Special Forces, private military contractors, an Army psyops sergeant major, a cavalry scout instructor in Texas, a grunt in Afghanistan. There were Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, a 20-year special agent in the Secret Service, and two people who said they were in the FBI.
“I will not go quietly into this dark night that is facing MY beloved America,” a Marine veteran from Wisconsin wrote; an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department said he’d enlist his colleagues “to fight the tyranny our country is facing.” Similar pledges came from a police captain in Texas, an Army recruiter in Oregon, and a Border Patrol agent in Arizona, among many others. “Funny story,” wrote a police sergeant in a St. Louis suburb. “I stopped a speeding truck driver, who had your decal on the side of his truck, I asked about it, he went on and on, I said, ‘Damn I’m all about this.’ ” He listed skills as a firearms and tactical instructor and said he would forward the membership application to his fellow officers. A special agent in the New York City Police Department’s intelligence bureau recalled that he’d been heading to work one day when he saw a window decal with the Oath Keepers logo and jotted down the name on his hand. He vowed to be ready “if the balloon ever goes up.”
Many answers to the question of how new members could help the Oath Keepers were innocuous: “I make videos!” and “Not much but my big mouth! Too old for much else!” People offered to show up at protests, hand out flyers, and post on Facebook. Others provided résumés with skills suited for conflict. A soldier with a U.S. Army email address detailed a background in battlefield intelligence, writing, “I am willing to use any skills you identify as helpful,” and an Iraq War veteran pledged “any talents available to a former infantry team leader.” Still others listed skills in marksmanship, SWAT tactics, interrogation. A Texas businessman offered his ranch “for training or defensive purposes,” and a Michigan cop, retired from the Special Forces, volunteered as a “tactical/political leader when occasion arrives in near future.”
As I pored through the entries, I began to see them as a window into something much larger than the Oath Keepers. Membership in the group was often fleeting—some people had signed up on a whim and forgotten about it. The Oath Keepers did not have 25,000 soldiers at the ready. But the files showed that Rhodes had tapped into a deep current of anxiety, one that could cause a surprisingly large contingent of people with real police and military experience to consider armed political violence. He was like a fisherman who sinks a beacon into the sea at night, drawing his catch toward the light.
The entries dated from 2009 until 2015, not long before the start of Trump’s presidential campaign. I used them as a starting point for conversations with dozens of current and former members. The dominant mood was foreboding. I found people far along in deliberations about the prospect of civil conflict, bracing for it and afflicted by the sense that they were being pushed toward it by forces outside their control. Many said they didn’t want to fight but feared they’d have no choice.
The first person I contacted, in January, was David Solomita, an Iraq War veteran in Florida whose entry said that a police officer had recruited him to the Oath Keepers while he was out to dinner with his wife. I didn’t mention civil war when I emailed, yet he replied, “I want to make this clear, I am a libertarian and was in Iraq when it became a civil war, I want no part of one.”
Later, Solomita said that he’d been an Oath Keeper for a year before leaving because Rhodes “wanted to be at the center of the circus when [civil war] kicked off.” America’s political breakdown, he added, reminded him too much of what he’d seen overseas.
On Martin Luther King Day, I walked into downtown Richmond, Virginia, behind a group of white men in jeans with rifles on their shoulders and pistols at their waists. A mother pulled her toddler away, whispering, “Those men have guns.” Semitrucks paraded down the street, flying Trump flags. They blared their horns, and the men cheered. Soon I was at the state capitol, surrounded by 22,000 people, many of them carrying AR-15s and political signs. oppose tyranny. guns save lives. trump 2020.
In Virginia, the holiday is the occasion for an annual event called Lobby Day, when citizens petition lawmakers about any issue they like. This year, the atmosphere was charged. The state legislature had just sworn in its first Democratic majority in two decades, and lawmakers had advanced a raft of gun-control measures. Rural counties were declaring themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries” as sheriffs vowed not to enforce new gun laws. Virginia is an open-carry state, and armed protesters from across the country had turned the day into a rally for gun rights.
Rhodes was there, along with some other Oath Keepers. On a Facebook page called “The Militias March on Richmond,” an organizer of the event declared that he’d sworn an oath to defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic when he joined the military and the police—and now a militia. He called Virginia the scene of “a great awakening.”
Virginia was a microcosm of the far right’s fears for the 2020 election: a swing to the left followed by an immediate push for gun control that would be the starting point for a wider assault on American freedoms. Many current and former Oath Keepers told me that gun rights were what had inspired them to join the group; some dismissed the more lurid parts of Rhodes’s list of 10 orders to defy.
David Hines, a conservative writer, has called guns the right’s most successful organizing platform. The issue demands local involvement, to closely track not just federal but state and municipal laws and politics. Guns are also social. To shoot them, you’ll likely head to a range, and to buy them, you’ll likely visit a store or a gun show where you’ll find people who share your mindset. “Guns,” Hines writes, “are onramps to activism.”
I couldn’t find Rhodes or any other Oath Keepers as I squeezed through the crowd. Instead I met protesters like Daniel McClure, a 23-year-old working as a contractor for the Tennessee Valley Authority, who stood with his dad near the capitol lawn. He was pleased by the turnout, he told me, but also willing to abandon peaceful protest if democracy stopped working. His idea of responsible citizenship meant keeping the prospect of insurrection in reserve. He repeated a maxim I heard often: Gun rights are the rights that protect all the rest. “If speaking softly won’t work,” he said, lifting the butt of his rifle, “the stick will come.”
Before the rally, the FBI had arrested alleged white supremacists who planned to fire on the crowd to incite a wider conflict, according to prosecutors, and social media had been filled with not-so-veiled threats against Virginia’s Democratic lawmakers. I was struck by how commonplace talk of violence had become. Liberals had been invoking it, too. “Your little AR-15 isn’t going to do shit to protect you from the government—who has tanks and nuclear weapons. That is a pathetic fantasy,” the top aide to a Virginia lawmaker had written in a viral tweet a few months earlier.
In the crowd, I noticed men muttering into walkie-talkies, their eyes hidden behind wraparound shades. To me they had the aspect of children playing at war, only their guns were real. There was a loud bang, and I whirled around as hands moved toward triggers. But someone had only knocked a metal sign onto the pavement.
The rally ended peacefully. Protesters picked up trash as the men with walkie-talkies faded into the city.
“That’s a nice transition, ISIS to us,” Rhodes said when I first called him, in February, and told him what had led me to the Oath Keepers. It wasn’t just the membership files. In 2016, I’d been reporting on the fall of the Islamic State in Mosul when I noticed that Americans were threatening civil conflict at home and wondered if any of them were really serious.
I told him there’s nothing worse than civil war. “I beg to differ,” he replied. He ticked off dictators: Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao. “I think what was done by them was far worse,” he said. “If you’re going to slide into a nightmare like that, you need to fight.” He referenced a passage from The Gulag Archipelago, by the Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
People on the militant right often cite these lines or a similar passage from an acclaimed 1955 book about Germany’s descent into Nazism, They Thought They Were Free:
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow … But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.
For people like Rhodes, the message of both passages is the same. Americans are sleepwalking toward an abyss. Patriots need to wake up and resist.
“It’s not just about guns,” Rhodes said. But guns were at the heart of it. Trump was stoking the idea that conservatives are a minority threatened by a demographic tide that will let liberal cities dictate the terms for the rest of the country. When I asked Rhodes and other people on the militant right to name concerns beyond gun rights, they mentioned how history is taught in schools, or how the Green New Deal would threaten land use, agriculture, single-family homes. They stressed that America is a republic, not a democracy. Liberals, Rhodes told me, want to see “a narrow majority trampling on our rights. The only way to do that is to disarm us first.”
I asked whether the Oath Keepers were white nationalists. The group had participated in events with the Proud Boys, a group of self-described “Western chauvinists,” and provided security at a so-called free-speech rally headlined by the alt-right activist Kyle Chapman. “We’re not fucking white nationalists,” Rhodes said, pointing out that the Oath Keepers have disavowed the Proud Boys and that their vice president is Black. “That’s the new smear. Everybody on the right is a white nationalist. And when you have that drumbeat of demonization, then what are we supposed to think?”
Like Trump, Rhodes relentlessly demonizes Black Lives Matter activists as “Marxists”—a foreign enemy. And he dwells on imagined threats from undocumented immigrants and Muslims that fit his ideas about a globalist push to undermine Western values. His mother is from a family of Mexican migrant laborers; as a child, he spent summers picking fruit and vegetables alongside them. But he told me that his relatives were conservative Christians and that they—the key word—“assimilated.”
Rhodes said I should investigate militant groups on the left such as the John Brown Gun Club, and seemed obsessed with antifa, which he said the Oath Keepers had faced down while providing security at right-wing rallies. “If Trump wins, guess who’s going to show up,” he said. “The left will be in the streets rioting.”
He added that he’d been using liberals’ “drumbeat of anti-cop sentiment” in his outreach to police. “That’s what we tell them: ‘Come on, guys. They hate your guts.’ ”
The most famous Oath Keeper after Rhodes is John Karriman, a pastor and former police trainer from Missouri who participated in the Ferguson operation. Critics saw the Oath Keepers’ presence in Ferguson as inflammatory, an attempt to intimidate protesters. But to Karriman, the operation was a success: They’d helped protect the community, including a Black-owned business, and left without raising their weapons. It was an example of what he wanted the Oath Keepers to be—a group that could “keep our country free and keep our fellow travelers honest and not step a foot over the line,” he told me. “I had high hopes that the Oath Keepers could be the brand that other groups could rally around.”
But behind the scenes, Karriman and others who were close to Rhodes told me, the Oath Keepers were plagued by dysfunction. Rhodes would disappear for long stretches and stall on initiatives—such as a national program to offer community training in firearm safety, first aid, and disaster relief—that would have been a boon to recruiting. Wealthy donors offered money, Karriman said, but when they asked to see the group’s books, Rhodes declined. In 2017, a blogger published allegations of embezzlement by the group’s IT administrator and accused Rhodes of covering it up, citing documents and recordings. Karriman demanded reforms but was ultimately pushed out. Other board members resigned, chapters dissolved, and the membership files were leaked to the Southern Poverty Law Center. (Rhodes denies these accusations and attributes them to a “coup attempt” by people with whom he has ideological differences.)
Several former deputies to Rhodes told me his behavior had grown erratic. At the Bundy-ranch standoff in 2014, he’d claimed to have intelligence that the Obama administration was planning a drone strike on the Patriot encampment. The Oath Keepers pulled back as militiamen from other groups accused them of desertion. The next year, he said in a speech that John McCain should be tried and hanged for treason because he supported the indefinite detention of American citizens suspected of terrorism. Afterward, he told me, he began facing heightened scrutiny at airports. In 2015, he was disbarred. In 2018, his wife petitioned for an order of protection during divorce proceedings, alleging that Rhodes had once grabbed their daughter by the throat and had a habit, during marital arguments, of waving a pistol in the air before pointing it at his head. (Rhodes denies these allegations. The petition was not granted.)
He was also pushing the Oath Keepers in a direction that clashed with the quieter mode some of his members favored. In the files, I found a note appended to the entry of an Air Force officer asking that his name be stricken from the rolls. The officer “will still be with us,” the note read, but he wanted to protect his 15-year career in the military. The note was from Steve Homan, a Vietnam veteran from Nebraska and a former vice president of the Oath Keepers. When I called him, he recounted how he’d focused on recruiting people with military skills while trying not to draw too much attention. He weeded out the “wild hats.” He wanted people willing and able to “slug back” against the government if necessary but levelheaded enough not to start the fight. He referred to them as “quiet patriots,” his version of the militant right’s Gray Man trope, a silent majority that will come to his side in a conflict.
This description fit a Special Operations soldier I found in the files who told me he’d never appeared at an event but was ready to step in if needed. He has an Oath Keepers bumper sticker on his vehicle at the base, so that other soldiers will ask him about it. The question of violence, he said, “definitely comes up, and my response is that it absolutely could include armed conflict. I like to use the Revolutionary War as an example. The militias were there, well armed and organized, not looking to pick a fight but ready when it happened.”
Homan’s approach required subtlety, and gathering a band of gray men in the shadows was difficult when Oath Keepers were toting weapons on the national news. Appended to several entries, I found letters of resignation in which people complained that the group was becoming too militialike. But I also noted spikes in new members—each paying a $50 annual fee—when Rhodes made headlines. “The publicity and the money, it was feeding him,” Homan recalled. Eventually he resigned.
One Marine veteran told me that when he signed up in 2013, he’d recently retired after seven years as a military contractor, during which he’d trained indigenous forces in Afghanistan. Senior Oath Keepers asked him to provide members with paramilitary training. He warned Rhodes that training the wrong people could lead to trouble; they might even turn on him. But he agreed after Rhodes said he could do the vetting himself.
He kept a lookout for people who displayed red flags such as talking about making explosives or silencers. “There were guys who wanted to go full-blown militia. And there were people like myself who just wanted to support the community in case of a breakdown in order,” he said. Eventually he felt that Rhodes was adopting an “offensive mindset”—almost pushing for a fight, especially after the Bundy standoff. He resigned, became a sheriff’s deputy, and is now training as a priest.
In April, a group called the Michigan Liberty Militia appeared with semiautomatic rifles at a rally in the state capitol, where protesters were demanding an end to coronavirus lockdowns and calling the governor a Nazi. The militiamen looked down from a second-floor balcony as lawmakers wearing body armor pushed through the crowd below. Images of the scene went viral. Afterward, I called one of the militia’s leaders, Phil Robinson, at his home in a small town west of Lansing. “I’m not going to lie to you, man,” he told me. “I feel like a movie star.”
Rhodes, meanwhile, was struggling to find his place in the anti-lockdown movement. He initially worried about the pandemic, and wrote an early post urging shutdown measures before facing a backlash; one prominent Oath Keeper accused him of being “controlled opposition” and resigned. Soon Rhodes was in the unmasked crowds himself, echoing Trump’s claims that the hysteria about the virus was part of a plot against him.
But the ideas that Rhodes had helped popularize were spreading. Robinson told me he’d never been in the police or military—then noted that joining his group meant swearing an oath to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Other militias simply pasted Rhodes’s 10 orders on their websites without attribution. Videos circulated of uniformed police officers calling the lockdown measures tyrannical, emphasizing their oaths, and telling their fellow officers to wake up.
Then the Black Lives Matter protests erupted. Armed men surfaced amid the unrest, carrying out Ferguson-style operations. Rhodes tried to organize vigilante teams of his own on the social-networking site Discord, but he made little progress before the forum he created was shut down and the participants banned.
Newer groups were calling openly for civil war, saying they wanted to get on with it already. Members of the so-called boogaloo movement wore aloha shirts when they appeared in the crowds with semiautomatic weapons, suggesting that they saw the outbreak of violence as something like a party. Many in the new generation dismissed older leaders like Rhodes as too tame. On gun rights and other issues, they resented their forebears for giving up so much already.
The moment lacked the clarity of the era in which Rhodes had gained prominence, when Patriot groups positioned themselves against Obama and the federal government. Some “boog bois” were white supremacists. Yet when police tried to separate the protesters into opposing sides, some of the young men in aloha shirts insisted on standing with Black Lives Matter. There were alleged shootings by white supremacists and also by people who’d come out to protest against police brutality. Patriot groups became obsessed with a new Black militia called the Not Fucking Around Coalition; the two sides confronted each other at a march honoring Breonna Taylor, and police had to intervene. Sales of guns and ammo were surging.
One afternoon, I received an email from an Army veteran and former Oath Keeper named Adam Boyle, who said he’d been protecting a shopping center in Missouri with a former Marine special operator named Nick. Boyle’s story had the dreamlike logic of nonlinear conflict. “Myself and Nick established a defensive security position in front of Pepperoni Bill’s Pizza,” he wrote, and then protesters arrived. The duo braced themselves, detecting an agitator among the protesters, who appeared to have a knife, but the protesters drove him away. Boyle and his friend began talking with the protesters and realized that they shared some common ground.
Then a new enemy emerged: Two white men drove up, and Nick saw that they had a pistol in the car. When two Black women tried to leave, the men in the car chased after them. “Nick jumped into my truck, armed himself at a low-ready with his AR-15, and we aggressively pursued the men,” Boyle wrote. The men retreated, and the vigilantes embraced the rally’s organizer. “We had bridged a political gap and come together for a common cause of peace,” Boyle wrote. I noted the almost desperate attempt to reestablish goodwill—and the myriad ways the night could have turned into a catastrophe. While Rhodes was invoking the glory of Lexington Green, a grim reality could have played out in the confusion at Pepperoni Bill’s.
One evening in July, I walked into a VFW hall outside Nashville, past a bar crowded with maskless patrons and into a windowless room with a dance floor. A couple dozen people sat at tables on one side. Next to the door was a sign-in sheet that asked for the same information that appeared in the leaked files: name and contact information, what skills people could offer.
Rhodes had called the meeting as part of a new organizing push. He’d been driving around the South—attending a militia rally in Virginia one day, visiting members in North Carolina another—and agreed to let me join him in Tennessee. He was late. Some Three Percenters sat in one corner, looking impatient. I sat with a pair of Oath Keepers in another.
One was an older man in an Australian-outback hat. The other was an Iraq War combat veteran who had recently joined the Oath Keepers. He began talking about his experience overseas, and how in the chaos of war, U.S. soldiers had faced the horrible prospect of killing children, who might charge at them strapped with IEDs. “I prefer that to the alternative,” the man in the hat said, “of being splattered against the wall.”
Finally Rhodes walked in and put his dusty Oath Keepers hat on a table. “Why are you all sitting so far apart?” he asked. “Let’s get everyone together.”
Rhodes spoke like an errant professor, intent on explaining an idea: that it’s the people themselves, not any one group, who are the real militia. This, he said, was what the Founders had had in mind. He suggested that the attendees organize locally. The Oath Keepers would act like the Special Forces do overseas, training people and serving as a force multiplier. “Don’t call yourselves Oath Keepers or Three Percenters,” he said. “Call yourselves the militia of Rutherford County.”
As Rhodes told the people in the crowd to be ready for war, I sized them up. Some looked hardened, but many more did not. One man rested a hand on a cane. When Rhodes asked what their concerns were, several said they feared that rioters would show up in their neighborhoods.
His comments became more inflammatory as he began to warn about antifa and protesters. “They are insurrectionists, and we have to suppress that insurrection,” he said. “Eventually they’re going to be using IEDs.”
“Us old vets and younger ones are going to end up having to kill these young kids,” he concluded. “And they’re going to die believing they were fighting Nazis.”
Afterward, Rhodes traveled through Kentucky, meeting Oath Keepers at their homes, where the conversations stretched for hours, always winding around the same question—what if?—and always coming back to the election. A man named James, a new member, told me people would accept the result—“as long as we believe the vote was fair. And if both sides can’t come to an agreement, then you’re going to have a conflict.”
It could start with a protest gone wrong, he said, or shots from a provocateur. Someone mentioned a young mother in Indiana who’d been shot and killed after reportedly shouting “All lives matter” during an argument with strangers.
“We talk about being attacked,” another man said. “Now, I have a question. What if you’re attacked in subtle and consistent ways over a period of time?”
I drove from Kentucky into the mountains of Carroll County, Virginia, and, in a field along a winding road, parked at the end of a long row of pickup trucks and SUVs. A hundred people, most of them armed, were looking up at a man giving a speech from the back of a flatbed truck that was painted in camouflage. Between the crowd and me were two young men with semiautomatic rifles. They stopped me in a manner—neither friendly nor unfriendly—that I’d encountered at checkpoints in other parts of the world.
So-called militia musters like this one had been quietly happening all over the state. The legislature was still pushing ahead with gun-control measures, and people were preparing for the possibility of more riots, and for the election. Rhodes was scheduled to give remarks but, as usual, he was late.
One of the young men said something into a walkie-talkie, and a muscular Iraq War veteran named Will joined me and explained the reason for the guards and the men posted in the woods on the far side of the field. They weren’t worried about law enforcement—a deputy from the sheriff’s department stood not far from me, leaning against his cruiser. It was leftists, antifa, who might record your license plate, dox you, show up at your home.
This was a different kind of crowd than Rhodes had drawn to the VFW hall. Many were in their 20s and 30s and had come in uniforms—some Three Percenters wore black T‑shirts and camouflage pants, and members of another group stood together in matching woodland fatigues. From the latter, a man climbed onto the flatbed and introduced himself as Joe Klemm, the leader of a new militia called the Ridge Runners.
He was a 29-year-old former marine and spoke with a boom that brought the crowd to attention. “I’ve seen this coming since I was in the military,” he said. “For far too long, we’ve given a little bit here and there in the interest of peace. But I will tell you that peace is not that sweet. Life is not that dear. I’d rather die than not live free.”
“Hoo-ah,” some people cheered.
“It’s going to change in November,” Klemm continued. “I follow the Constitution. We demand that the rest of you do the same. We demand that our police officers do the same. We’re going to make these people fear us again. We should have been shooting a long time ago instead of standing off to the side.”
“Are you willing to lose your lives?” he asked. “Are you willing to lose the lives of your loved ones—maybe see one of your loved ones ripped apart right next to you?”
After he finished, Rhodes rolled up in his rented Dodge Ram and parked in the grass beside me. He walked to the flatbed but didn’t climb it. Then he turned and faced the crowd. His speech meandered back to revolutionary times, evoking the traditions of a country founded in bloodshed. He urged them to build a militia for their community.
Rhodes stayed at the muster long after most people had left, meeting every last person, his history lessons stretching on and on. Eventually the conversation turned to the problems in the area—the drug overdoses and mental-health crises and the desperate state of the local economy. The people there seemed to believe that taking up arms would somehow stave off the country’s unraveling rather than speed it along.
When the protests erupted in Kenosha a month later, many of the demonstrators brought guns, and vigilante groups quickly formed on the other side. They called themselves the Kenosha Guard. There was a confrontation near a gas station like the one at Pepperoni Bill’s, and a teenager allegedly opened fire and killed two people. A man affiliated with antifa allegedly gunned down a Trump supporter in Portland later that week, and Rhodes declared that “the first shot has been fired.”
By then, some writers popular on the militant right had been warning that wars don’t always start with a clear, decisive event—an attack, a coup, an invasion—and that you might not realize you’re in one until it’s under way. Civil conflict is gradual. The path to it, I thought, might begin with brooding over it. It could start with opening your mind.
Attendees clash during a Trump rally at the International Exposition Center on March 12, 2016, in Cleveland, Ohio. (photo: Brendan Smialoski/Getty)
There Are Proven Ways to Keep Protests Peaceful. Trump Is Doing the Opposite.
German Lopez, Vox
Lopez writes: "In the months of Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd in May, President Donald Trump has called on local and state officials to crack down as harshly as possible - a call he repeated at Tuesday's presidential debate. But experts say that Trump's rhetoric and actions risk inflaming tensions and escalating protests further, instead of keeping the peace."
At the presidential debate, Trump continued to use rhetoric that will only make tensions worse.
Trump has characterized the protests as violent, even though more than 90 percent of thousands of protests nationwide have been peaceful. He’s dismissed protesters’ concerns, promising to “DEFEND OUR POLICE” rather than pursue policing reforms. He’s refused to criticize a vigilante shooter who killed two demonstrators and was charged with murder.
Trump has saved his harshest criticisms for local leaders he claims are too soft on the demonstrations. He’s called cities like Portland, Oregon, where protests have gone on for months and at times gotten violent, “a mess,” claiming Portland and other cities are “weakly run by Radical Left Democrat Governors and Mayors!” He sent federal agents to harass and arrest protesters in Portland and other cities. All of this escalated last month as the Trump administration declared New York City, Portland, and Seattle “anarchist cities,” setting them up to potentially lose federal funds.
He again used this kind of rhetoric at Tuesday’s presidential debate: “If we would send in the National Guard, it would be over.” (Governors in states where riots broke out have, in fact, sent in the National Guard.)
Some Republican leaders are taking cues from Trump. Last month, for example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis proposed changes that would escalate penalties for riots, block state funding for cities that “defund the police,” and stiffen penalties for protesters who hit a police officer during a “disorderly assembly,” Politico reported.
But if the goal is ensuring that protesters can exercise their First Amendment rights while avoiding the outbreaks of violence seen in Portland; Kenosha, Wisconsin; and other cities in the US this past summer, the confrontational, dismissive approach that Trump and his allies are taking will very likely make things worse, experts say.
The point of protests is for people to feel heard. Demonstrators are marching in the streets because they want to say something, and they want others — the public, politicians, and so on — to see and hear those messages.
“When we look at where protests are flaring up, they’re flaring up in response to incidents of [police] brutality,” Erica Chenoweth, an expert at Harvard on protests and political violence, told me. “So the No. 1 thing is to just make those instances of brutality stop.”
In the moment, government officials who want to keep peace at protests, including the police, should take steps that don’t just protect protesters’ and the public’s safety but also their rights to speak out and demonstrate.
If law enforcement acts indiscriminately — by, say, tear-gassing everyone — that risks escalating the situation, fostering a sense among protesters that their rights to free speech and assembly are being suppressed even though they did nothing wrong.
That’s especially true when it’s the police’s own actions that are the subject of protests. By behaving in a way that may validate protesters’ concerns about excessive use of force and police brutality more broadly, the cops only heighten tensions further.
“If an authority figure exerts some type of control or dominance or power that’s perceived to be unjustified, what that does is then trigger a psychological process where [protesters] now have a common enemy,” Tamara Herold, director of the Crowd Management Research Council at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told me. “And that can actually escalate violence.”
Protests can be calmed as long as people feel heard, and if they can peacefully practice their legal rights to free speech and assembly. Break that — with inflammatory presidential rhetoric or blanket tear-gassing of largely peaceful crowds — and violence is more likely to break out.
Protesters want to feel heard
The goal of the government’s response to any protest should be to ensure that people feel heard and can express their opinions, while still protecting the broader public if things get out of control.
The problem is this is easier said than done.
“There’s a million factors that can affect the outcome that will impact how you approach, from weather conditions … to the time of day to the demographics of the protesters to where you are,” Herold said. “There are no easy answers.”
One method is meeting with the protest organizers to set the terms of engagement — what’s known as “negotiated management.” The terms have to be reasonable, and the police should try to avoid taking sides. In doing this, police can set expectations, so it’s less surprising if they, say, have to suddenly move into a crowd to arrest someone. At the same time, this also can help protesters know what they have to avoid and potentially self-police to keep the peace.
This model, however, has fallen out of favor with many police departments since the 1990s as protests have become less organized and hierarchical, at times leaving no one for the police to actually meet. That’s led more police to move toward a model of “strategic incapacitation,” in which they try to contain protests and target only those who are acting out violently.
What that looks like: “Whenever we can, facilitate the constitutional rights of protesters who are protesting peacefully and not causing harm,” Herold said. “At the same time, quickly and efficiently as possible address those individuals who are causing harm. And you have to be very focused when it comes to that.”
Again, that can be difficult. If several protesters are throwing bottles, rocks, and bricks at police from within an otherwise largely peaceful crowd, officers have a decision to make: They can forcefully move in to nab the wrongdoers (putting themselves at risk), they can try to disperse the crowd (an indiscriminate action that will affect peaceful protesters), or they can back off (which can risk letting violence, such as rioting or property damage, spiral out of control as it’s unsupervised). Coordination with protesters can make this easier, but that’s only likely if the police earn protesters’ cooperation.
Police can make these situations more difficult too, particularly if they take an aggressive stance against protesters — by, for instance, donning militarized equipment like long guns and body armor, as departments around the country did in response to this past summer’s protests.
“Most of the escalatory dynamics take place when, at least in authoritarian regimes, agents of the state turn out prepared for and engage in active repression,” Chenoweth said. “That’s always going to trigger escalation.”
When police are the target of protests, they likely overreact more
Videos from earlier this year showed police cracking down on the protests with excessive and indiscriminate force, like when New York City cops rammed vehicles into protesters, Dallas officers tear-gassed peaceful demonstrations, Buffalo police shoved a 75-year-old man to the ground, and federal agents beat a military veteran in Portland.
Based on the research, aggressive police behavior this summer wasn’t abnormal. A 2016 study by researcher Heidi Reynolds-Stenson, looking at protests from 1960 to 1995, found police are more likely to act aggressively against police brutality protests than they are against other kinds of demonstrations — showing up twice as often and taking action, from arrests to use of force, almost 40 percent more often.
In short: Police act more aggressively when they’re the target of protests. As Herold put it, “When you are the target of the protests, it certainly changes the dynamic of what happens at these events.”
But experts emphasized that the authorities should still try to acknowledge the protesters’ concerns, even if they feel wrongly attacked or criticized. Some police chiefs already do this following a police shooting or killing — saying the incident is being investigated or, in the case of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, describing what the officer did as a “murder.” Other departments have tried to avoid a confrontational stance, either ditching the riot gear or kneeling with protesters in an attempt to make it clear the demonstrators’ concerns are heard.
“Perception matters,” Herold said. “The specific tactics that the officers use influences that perception, so it matters a great deal — everything from the way officers are dressed to the equipment deployed to the way directives are being issued. All of those things matter.”
If protesters feel that their attempts at peaceful demonstrations are being or have been unfairly shut down, they’re more likely to get aggressive.
“Police need to understand their role in the relationship dynamic with crowds,” Ed Maguire, a criminal justice expert at Arizona State University, told me. “Each act on their part that is perceived by the crowd as aggressive or escalatory will result in the crowd escalating. The goal is to ensure that police do everything possible on their side not to escalate conflict unnecessarily.”
Protest control tactics can only go so far
While specific tactics can work in the moment to prevent largely peaceful protests from getting out of control, the way forward, in the long term, is to actually address the issues protesters are raising. In many circumstances, the situation that leads to violence doesn’t bubble up solely in the hours or moments before that violence breaks out.
Protests don’t solely react or escalate based on what’s happening right in front of them. They’re influenced by all sorts of factors: what public officials are saying about them at the time; whether their actions are leading to significant social, cultural, or legal changes; the historical issues surrounding their grievances; and so on.
In some cases, riots and looting are really just people taking advantage of chaos to make a quick buck. But these acts of violence are also often rooted in genuine grievances about a social issue.
If protesters feel like they or people like them have been saying the same thing for decades, and no one has listened, there’s a chance they will be more aggressive and even violent. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
This is an issue at any Black Lives Matter protest. Systemic racism has been a part of the US for centuries, and the issue of police brutality, specifically, has led to generations of protests and riots over police abuse against Black people going back to the 1960s and before.
Yet in all this time, minority communities’ grievances with the police — that they’re simultaneously too oppressive but do little to solve serious crimes — haven’t been resolved. That leads to frustration and anger, which in turn can lead to more aggressive and violent acts of civil unrest.
The protesters’ concerns have been repeatedly validated by federal investigations. The Justice Department’s report on the Baltimore Police Department in 2016 noted when a police shift commander created an arrest form for loitering on public housing, he didn’t even try to hide his racist expectations. In the template, there was no space to fill in gender or race. Instead, that information was automatically filled out: “black male.”
The report found that Black people in Baltimore were much more likely to be stopped than their white counterparts even after controlling for population. One Black man in his mid-50s was stopped 30 times in less than four years — nearly one stop a month — despite never receiving a citation or criminal charge.
“Racially disparate impact is present at every stage of BPD’s enforcement actions, from the initial decision to stop individuals on Baltimore streets to searches, arrests, and uses of force,” the report concluded. “These racial disparities, along with evidence suggesting intentional discrimination, erode the community trust that is critical to effective policing.”
This is not something the Justice Department found only in Baltimore. It’s appeared again and again: Whether it’s Baltimore, Cleveland, New Orleans, Ferguson, or Chicago, the Justice Department has found horrific constitutional violations in how police use force, how they target minority residents, how they stop and ticket people, and just about every other aspect of policing.
None of this justifies the damage and harm that riots and general violence do. (And the research suggests riots can backfire politically.) But if you want to stop people from rioting, you have to understand the issues that led people to riot in the first place.
“It’s a huge country, and these are really complex issues,” Chenoweth said. “It’s not easy.”
Trump is making the situation worse — maybe deliberately so
Meanwhile, Trump is basically doing the opposite of what experts recommend to calm tense demonstrations.
He’s ignored or outright rejected protesters’ main concerns about systemic racism. When asked about police killing Black people, Trump responded, “What a terrible question to ask. So are white people. More white people, by the way.” (When considering population, Black people are disproportionately killed by police, far more than white people.)
Trump sent federal agents to Portland. The agents were indiscriminate in their actions, going after attendees both peaceful and not with tear gas, rubber bullets, and arrests. That led to nights of violence and chaos in the city, calming down only after the feds left.
Trump has even justified violence when it wasn’t perpetuated by Black Lives Matter protesters. After a self-identified militia member killed two people at the protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and was charged with murder, Trump argued the shooter “probably would have been killed” and was acting in self-defense. That seemed to condone vigilante violence against the demonstrations, inflaming tensions on both sides.
“Unfortunately, President Trump’s words routinely escalate conflict and violence rather than calming tensions and reducing these problems,” Maguire said.
This, arguably, makes things more difficult for police, too. The rhetoric around Black Lives Matter protests “is exacerbating the situation that police find themselves in,” Frank Straub, director of the Center for Mass Violence Response Studies at the Police Foundation, told me. “It’s creating a no-win situation.” He added, “If we can get the rhetoric down and the polarization down, we are in a unique period of our history that, with thoughtful, constructive discussion, there’s the opportunity to maybe reach some resolutions to these issues or find a collaborative way forward.”
Perhaps the escalation is intentional. Trump has repeatedly pointed to the protests and chaos in US cities in what seems like an attempt to distract from his failures as president, including his botched handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and the collapsing economy. His campaign for president appears to see the violence as beneficial, speaking to the need for Trump’s dog whistle of “law and order.”
“The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order,” former White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said on Fox News.
That, of course, ignores that all of this “chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence” is happening under Trump’s watch. Yet that hasn’t stopped Trump’s campaign from blaming Democratic mayors for the violence and using the scenes of protests to claim, in reference to the Democratic presidential candidate, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”
In this context, maybe the Trump campaign wants to keep the chaos and violence going.
That’d be straight out of the authoritarian playbook. “It’s almost universal that authoritarian leaders try to foment conflict in these types of conditions,” Chenoweth said. “It’s really hard for them to manage the use of people power. … You almost have to give in to make it stop.” Short of that, Chenoweth explained, authoritarians will try to make peaceful protesters out to be terrorists or coup plotters, and “infiltrate and provoke movements into using violence” — and that violence by protesters, at least in countries with strong government institutions, “almost always favors the incumbent politically.”
That seems to be the gamble Trump is now taking: Maybe his actions and rhetoric lead to more violence in the short term, but that’s okay if it gets him reelected. The candidate who’s claiming that he’ll make America safe is now possibly making America less safe to get his most desired wish.
Trump nominee for the Supreme Court Amy Coney Barrett. (photo:Caroline Brehman/AP)
Amy Coney Barrett Signed Letter Urging End of 'Barbaric' Roe v. Wade
Sam Stein, The Daily Beast
Stein writes: "Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett signed a letter in 2006 that included a call for the end of Roe v. Wade, denouncing the seminal court decision that provided a legal right to abortion as 'barbaric.'"
The letter came in the form of an advertisement from the anti-choice group St Joseph County Right to Life which was based in South Bend, Indiana.
“The Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion for any reason,” the ad read. “It’s time to put an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade and restore laws that protect the lives of unborn children.”
At the time of the ad, Barrett worked as a law professor at the University of Notre Dame. The views expressed in the letter reflect the thinking of a vast majority of conservatives and many Catholics. But they present potential political problems for Barrett now that she is President Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court.
Trump, on Tuesday night, tried to downplay the notion that Barrett’s confirmation could result in the overturning of Roe, saying that there was no way to know that abortion rights could be impacted by her taking the seat of the recently deceased Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The letter from St Joseph County Right to Life was first reported by The Guardian, which reported that the group also believes that “discarding of unused or frozen embryos created in the in vitro fertilization (IVF) process ought to be criminalized.”
Coming to Barrett’s defense, Ramesh Pannuru, a writer for the National Review, argued that the she only signed on to one-half of the letter—the part that called for ending “abortion on demand’—and not the adjoining page, which called Roe “barbaric.” Both sides were run in the paper by St Joseph County Right to Life.
George Floyd's burial in Pearland, Texas, on June 9. (photo: Getty
Border Patrol Snipers Were Authorized to Use Deadly Force at George Floyd's Burial
Emily Green and Keegan Hamilton, VICE
Excerpt: "With hundreds of mourners planning to gather in Pearland, Texas, on June 9 for the burial of George Floyd, local and federal authorities braced for 'rioting and looting' in the Houston suburb - and they were willing to use deadly force."
Records obtained by VICE News show police in Pearland, Texas, invited federal agents to surveil Floyd's burial and authorized them to open fire in the event of unrest.
As a horse-drawn carriage took Floyd’s body to its final resting place in Pearland’s Houston Memorial Gardens cemetery, planning records show that at least six “sniper teams” were in place on rooftops and authorized to open fire if the situation spiraled out of control. The records, labeled highly confidential, also state that an FBI surveillance aircraft was flown over the burial, and that “overwatch units” were sent to monitor the crowd for violent “agitators.”
Pearland officials also welcomed a large contingent of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents to the city, including dozens of members of the immigration agency’s militarized tactical unit. Known as BORTAC, it’s equipped with military-grade firepower and commando-style uniforms, and deploys to conflict zones “around the world,” according to the agency.
With the burial occurring in the wake of nationwide protests that in some instances turned violent, city records show that law enforcement prepared for the worst-case scenario in Pearland. The records show local and federal officials were ready and willing to open fire, even as the nation was undergoing a reckoning over systemic racism and excessive use of force by police in the aftermath of Floyd’s death.
The mayor of Houston took pains to emphasize the need for a more peaceful approach, announcing during his eulogy at Floyd’s funeral service that he would ban the use of chokeholds in the city. He also noted that Houston police officers are required to issue a verbal warning before shooting at anyone. In contrast, records show law enforcement in Pearland, about 20 miles south of Houston, had broad leeway to use deadly force during the burial proceedings.
The “rules of engagement” outlined in the documents show that CBP’s tactical unit was “geared up ready to deploy” in response to “verbal aggressive language” by protesters, or the throwing of empty water bottles. If the situation escalated to full water bottles or bricks being thrown, agents were authorized to use “less lethal/gas munitions.” If faced with more aggressive behavior that the officers believed could cause them imminent harm, the documents make clear: “deadly force is authorized anytime.”
That aggressive approach stands in stark contrast to the de-escalation tactics adopted by many police departments in the wake of Floyd’s killing, including bans on the use of tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets during protests.
Pearland city officials planned for up to 60,000 mourners; the final attendance numbered in the hundreds. Around 7,000 people visited Floyd’s casket in Houston.
Ben Crump, an attorney for the Floyd family, said the family was not made aware of the presence of sniper units or CBP agents at the burial. He declined to comment further.
The documents, obtained via a public records request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and provided to VICE News, include a PowerPoint presentation detailing local and federal law enforcement preparations for Floyd’s burial in Pearland. The presentation and other records show that while Pearland officials were preparing for potential attacks on the burial procession, the primary concern was civil unrest.
One slide in the presentation describes officers being “stationed for a quick response to rioting and looting.” Another says that if “non-peaceful protesting” were to occur during the burial, CBP’s tactical team would “take up positions around Pearland PD to prevent property loss or damage.” National Guard soldiers were on “ready posture as last line of defense.”
A memo sent to Pearland’s city manager 12 days after the burial includes screen caps of several social media posts that prompted concern from local authorities, including one that said “fuck tha suburbs” and “let’s loot Pearland’s town center.” The report also includes a number of messages sent to police from Pearland residents and business owners expressing fears about protesters and lawlessness.
Joshua Lee, the city’s spokesperson, defended Pearland’s handling of the Floyd burial in a statement to VICE News. Lee said the presence of CBP agents was “initiated by request of our [police] department.”
“The mission of all personnel was to provide a safe environment for the Floyd family to conduct their service in peace,” Lee said. “Just because nothing happened doesn’t mean there weren’t credible threats. We plan for a variety of potential outcomes to be as prepared as possible.”
That plan included 66 members of the CBP’s tactical squad, known as BORTAC. A CBP spokesman said the unit is “trained in highly specialized tactical emergency and response capabilities,” giving the agents the ability to “rapidly deploy to chaotic environments in which they may encounter uncommon or dangerous situations outside the scope of their normal border enforcement duties.”
But BORTAC has repeatedly faced criticism in recent months after being sent to Portland, Oregon, and other cities with large civil rights protests. Critics have claimed the outfit is straying far from its mission to protect the border and serving instead as President Trump’s secret police force. According to CBP, the unit was created in 1984 to quell riots at immigration detention centers, but in the years since it has become CBP’s equivalent to the Navy SEALs.
Shaw Drake, policy counsel for the ACLU of Texas-Border Rights Center, questioned whether the paramilitary force was necessary at Floyd’s burial.
“The agency went about building this baseless militarized response that demonstrates they are putting value on property over people,” Drake said. “As a whole, it shows an extreme militarization in response to potential things as little as verbal aggression or throwing empty water bottles.”
James Tomsheck, CBP’s assistant commissioner of internal affairs from 2006 to 2014, said he was not surprised to learn that BORTAC had been deployed to Pearland. Tomsheck became a whistleblower who alleged rampant corruption among the ranks of the Border Patrol and efforts to cover up shootings by agents, and he said the BORTAC unit’s presence at Floyd’s burial is another sign of the agency’s mission-creep beyond the border.
“The Border Patrol has for many years attempted to expand their mission and evolve into what they believe is their core role as a national police force,” Tomsheck said. “They have used the current political environment to advance that agenda.”
CBP wasn’t the only federal law enforcement agency with a presence at Floyd’s burial. The records say that “the FBI had a fixed wing asset aloft during the event,” an apparent reference to the type of small surveillance aircraft spotted flying over the protests in Minneapolis in the aftermath of Floyd’s death, a development first reported by Motherboard. Such aircraft carry sensitive equipment that can track the movement of people on the ground below, and have been used on counter-narcotics missions and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On June 9 — the same day the FBI plane was circling above Floyd’s burial service — 35 members of Congress sent a letter to the bureau’s director warning of “the chilling effect of government surveillance” on peaceful protests, and demanding a halt to the practice.
A spokesperson for the FBI did not comment.
The Pearland records indicate that the Texas Department of Public Safety also flew a surveillance aircraft over the burial procession, and “multiple” agencies had drones or “Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems” in the sky monitoring activities below. Some of the drones, according to the memo to Pearland’s city manager, were “used to capture footage of the event for post-operational purposes.”
Despite the fears of unrest, Floyd’s burial in Pearland turned out to be peaceful. One person was briefly detained for assault but released after the victim declined to press charges. A bomb scare at the mausoleum where Floyd was entombed turned out to be a false alarm. Firefighters helped 20 people who suffered from heat stroke or similar illnesses.
While the documents obtained by VICE News suggest that the Pearland officials were preoccupied with the threat of rioting, Lee, the Pearland police spokesperson, said the sniper teams and other extreme security precautions were taken in part to protect against “anticipated protests from Second Amendment groups or counterprotesters to those groups.”
The records do show the city paid over $30,000 for “bike rack-style barricades” to be placed along the burial procession route. Police also stationed “city-owned Light Military Tactical Vehicles” at certain intersections to “protect against vehicle-borne attacks.”
The total cost to the city of Pearland for Floyd’s burial was over $326,000, documents show, with most of the money covering overtime pay for police officers. That total doesn’t include additional federal taxpayer dollars spent deploying CBP and FBI agents.
Despite the exorbitant cost, the records indicate local officials were pleased with their handling of the event, with the memo to Pearland’s city manager noting: “The social media posts resulting from the event have been almost universally positive toward the city and its response.”
Brad Parscale Steps Down From Trump Re-Election Campaign After Hospitalization and Violent Threat
Brad Parscale Steps Down From Trump Re-Election Campaign After Hospitalization and Violent Threats
Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Brad Parscale, President Donald Trump's former campaign manager, is stepping away from the re-election campaign, days after he was hospitalized when Florida law enforcement officials said he threatened to harm himself."
rad Parscale, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, is stepping away from the re-election campaign, days after he was hospitalised when Florida law enforcement officials said he threatened to harm himself.
Parscale, one of Trump’s closest political aides, served as the campaign manager for the re-election effort until July, when he was demoted by Trump after a much-hyped campaign rally in Tulsa attracted an embarrassingly sparse crowd.
He was replaced by the then deputy campaign manager, Bill Stepien, but had stayed on as a senior adviser to the campaign until now.
Parscale’s break with the Trump campaign was first reported by Politico and was confirmed on Wednesday by a campaign official.
On Sunday, police officers talked Parscale out of his Fort Lauderdale home after his wife, Candice, called police to say that he had multiple firearms and was threatening to hurt himself. He was hospitalised on Sunday under the state’s Baker Act, which allows anyone deemed to be a threat to themselves or others to be detained for 72 hours for psychiatric evaluation.
On Monday afternoon, police body-cam footage was released of Parscale being dramatically taken down and handcuffed by police.
When officers initially arrived, Candice Parscale said the couple had argued and Brad pulled out a handgun and loaded it.
She said he had post-traumatic stress disorder and had recently become violent, showing police bruises on her arms from an argument two days prior. Police photographed the injuries, they said, and the Miami Herald reported.
In a statement to Politico on Wednesday, Candice Parscale denied Brad Parscale physically abused her, saying: “The statements I made on Sunday have been misconstrued, let it be clear my husband was not violent towards me that day or any day prior.”
Parscale’s firm developed websites for Trump’s personal businesses before working on his 2016 presidential campaign, where he was credited with overseeing the campaign’s largely unnoticed but influential social media efforts that helped promote Trump to the Oval Office.
Romani Rose, Raymond Gureme and Jesse Jackson at a commemoration for European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day 2019. (photo: Jarek Praszkiewicz/Documentation and Culture Center of German Sinti and Roma)
Romani Rose | Message to Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Push Coalition
Romani Rose, YouTube
Rose writes: "We are witnessing a new form of racism in the United States today, and I would like to express from Germany our solidarity with the Rainbow Push Organization. We see with great concern the violence directed against people because they have a different skin color."
irst of all, I would like to thank Jesse Jackson, and I am pleased and grateful to him for allowing me to speak to you today.
Jesse Jackson was with me in Auschwitz on August 2, 2019. Auschwitz is the symbol of the industrial murder of 500,000 Sinti and Roma and 6 million Jews. It was a breach of civilization, and after the end of World War II, the United Nations and many countries said, “Never again Auschwitz, never again racism.”
We are witnessing a new form of racism in the United States today, and I would like to express from Germany our solidarity with the Rainbow Push Organization. We see with great concern the violence directed against people because they have a different skin color.
Racism is a virus, and mankind has not yet found an immune system for it. But I also see the developments in Germany with great concern. In Germany, there is a new form of nationalism, as in many European countries, where populists and racists are again blaming scapegoats for a crisis that they either caused or are pushing, in order to maintain their power and to use people’s fears for their own ends.
The Corona Pandemic is, and we know this from history, the plague and cholera in past centuries. Minorities have always been blamed for it and persecuted. And there were even burnings in Europe.
In this context, it is important for me to point out once again the inhumane situation in Eastern Europe. The Corona Pandemic has intensified this situation. The people live in inhumane conditions. They are completely excluded from society. They go to special schools, as was the case in the United States in the twenties, a form of apartheid that is evident in all aspects of social life.
The world has to take a closer look at this. It should be of concern to us and the free world. We have overcome apartheid in South Africa. We must not now allow it in Europe.
The pandemic does not choose “races” as it is sometimes portrayed by others, it chooses people. We must take what we have today. We have democracies and we have the right to vote. We have to elect the democratic parties and we must not be seduced by populists and by false hate messages and hate propaganda.
Once again, our solidarity belongs to our brothers and sisters in America.
A new Pew project looks at the perception of scientists in 20 countries. (photo: Jeff Pachouda/Getty
Conservative Unease With Science Is Global, but Extreme in the US
John Timmer, Ars Technica
Timmer writes: "On Tuesday, the Pew Research Center released survey results that represent a picture of how the publics of 20 different countries view science and the technologies it enables - or at least how those countries viewed science and tech immediately before the pandemic struck."
A new Pew project looks at the perception of scientists in 20 countries.
n Tuesday, the Pew Research Center released survey results that represent a picture of how the publics of 20 different countries view science and the technologies it enables—or at least how those countries viewed science and tech immediately before the pandemic struck. The good news is that there's widespread trust in scientists and a strong desire to act on their findings on issues like climate change.
But the results also contain plenty of reasons for concern. Some of the outcomes of scientific development, such as genetically modified foods, are widely mistrusted by the public in most countries. And, in many countries, there's a large partisan divide in views of scientists—and the divide is the most extreme in the United States.
Respect
Normally, we'd spend some time discussing the details of how survey data was gathered. But with 20 countries, each with its own independent surveys, we'll just link you to the details and note that at least 1,000 people were surveyed in the following countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The top-line question was how much trust people have in scientists doing the right thing. Respondents were given the following options: "a lot," "some," "not too much," and "none at all." India was the country where people had the most trust in scientists, with about 60 percent saying they had a lot. That was followed by a large collection of European countries, with the United States falling in the middle of the pack. Asian countries—specifically, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—had the lowest scores. "A lot" scored less than 25 percent. Only three countries saw the combined "not much"/"none" categories come in above 30 percent: Brazil, Malaysia, and Taiwan.
So, while positive views are a bit erratic, negative views of scientists are pretty rare. The only caveat is that many respondents feel it's more important to rely on people with practical experience rather than expertise, with support for experts ranging from a low of 20 percent to a high of only 40 percent. What's not clear, however, is whether people would consider scientists strictly experts or experts with real-world experience.
Czechia
When it comes to scientific issues, the public generally stands with the conclusions of the scientific community. There was only a single country (the Czech Republic) where less than half of the public didn't think climate change was a major concern—and it was 49 percent there. The view that the climate was a serious problem was most prevalent in Taiwan, where 80 percent felt so; seven countries saw over two-thirds of their populace say so. And, of the nine countries where Pew has a decade of data, every single one saw this sentiment rise.
People were less accepting of the scientific conclusion that humans are driving climate change. Six countries saw less than half of the public agreeing with that conclusion (including the United States, at 49 percent). Spain and Taiwan saw the highest levels of acceptance, at just over three-quarters of the public.
The Pew also asked about whether people saw signs of climate change at their location and whether they felt their government was doing enough about the climate. But those answers are going to involve a complicated mix of personal beliefs, local weather trends, and national policy decisions. That means that unpacking those answers, which are a bit erratic, is a challenge. Drawing any conclusions from them will be difficult.
We’re all environmentalists
Just about all the respondents felt that protecting the environment should be a major priority, with a median of 70 percent feeling it should be prioritized over creating jobs. This ranged from a high in the UK and the Czech Republic (77 percent) down to a low of 56 percent in Russia. The support for renewable energy was even higher, clearing 90 percent in six European countries; all but two countries (India and Malaysia) saw the support clear 70 percent. Wind and hydro saw similar levels of public enthusiasm.
Only three countries saw over half the public support more coal use: India, Malaysia, and Russia. Those were also the only nations where support for oil development cleared 50 percent, although overall there was more enthusiasm for oil than coal. By contrast, only two countries (Sweden and the Netherlands) didn't support the use of more natural gas, the cleanest of the fossil fuels.
Support for nuclear energy was similar to that for coal, with a median of 37 percent of the public favoring its expanded use. Sweden and the Czech Republic were the only countries where support cleared 50 percent. So, with the exception of nuclear power, public support for energy production was largely in line with our need to address climate change, which can probably be considered a win for science-based policy.
About that technology, though...
One of the inevitable outcomes of scientific activity is new technology, and the Pew asked about a number of those, as well, including the expanded use of AI and automation. Most of the Asian countries saw high levels (> 60 percent) of support for this, with the exception of Malaysia and Australia. India was mixed, on the other hand, supporting AI but not automation. Support in Europe and North America was mixed, with most countries seeing it reach somewhere between 35 and 55 percent, with the notable exception of very high support for automation in Sweden.
On the public health front, trust in the health benefits of vaccines was at over 60 percent in a dozen countries. But that's not nearly as high as we want it to be. The lower trust largely occurred outside of Europe, with the exception of France (52 percent) and Russia. Russia was the only country where under half of the public trusted in the health benefits of vaccines, and that was before the somewhat bizarre messaging about the COVID-19 vaccine occurred. For the most part, trust in the benefits of vaccines matched up with the recognition that the probability of negative side effects was low.
But the biggest gap came when food technology was considered. Almost nobody considered genetically modified foods safe, with a median percentage of only 13 and the absolute peak of support coming in Australia at 31 percent. By contrast, there were eight countries in which more than half the public said GMOs were unsafe, despite the complete absence of any evidence for this claim. But it's not just GMOs; the numbers were remarkably similar when the use of pesticides or artificial preservatives were asked about, although there was some country-to-country variation (Germans, for example, are far more trusting of preservatives than GMOs).
Differences are largely political
The Pew uncovered a gender difference in feelings toward developing AI, automation, and other technology, with men typically supporting those technologies more than women. But the gap was fairly small, generally in the area of 10 to 15 points for AI. Only a slightly larger gap exists for automation and food technology. Education also made a difference that was similar in magnitude, with more education correlating with increased support for these technologies, as well as vaccination. There weren't any obvious geographical patterns regarding the size of the gap.
To see more substantial gaps, we can turn to the Pew's analysis of the political polarization of mistrust in scientists. Here, people on the liberal side of the spectrum were generally more trusting. A number of countries—Brazil, France, Poland, South Korea, and the Czech Republic—saw little political difference in whether they'd trust scientists to do the right thing. But the Netherlands saw a 10 point difference between liberals and conservatives, with liberals being more trusting.
Other European countries saw somewhat larger differences, and the gap was more pronounced when support for far-right populist parties was analyzed. But the English-speaking world is what really stood out. In the UK, the difference between liberals and conservatives was 27 points; Australia was 29 points; Canada was 39; and the US saw the largest difference, with a gap of 42 points between liberals and conservatives. In the States, only 20 percent of conservatives felt that scientists would do the right thing, and only 30 percent felt that scientists made judgements based on facts.
In something that will surprise nobody, these results largely match up with what's going on with climate change.
The largest gaps between conservatives and liberals on the seriousness of climate change were mostly in English-speaking countries, with the addition of Sweden, which sneaked in ahead of the UK. The United States again saw far and away the largest difference; in this case, 64 points separated liberals and conservatives.
More to come
One of the biggest things missing from the data is a sense of what's going on in Africa. We know that Africa has embraced some technologies (notably cell phones), and the rest of the world has to hope it will also embrace renewable energy. But a clearer picture of how they feel about current and future technologies would seem to be valuable knowledge.
We also want a repeat of the survey once the COVID-19 pandemic has subsided. COVID's decline will undoubtedly await the development of a safe vaccine, and in the mean time, the health and safety of citizens will rely on countries adopting the science-based advice of health experts. Finding out whether these will receive widespread recognition and cause any shifts in public opinion is a fascinating question.
But the key thing that needs to be explored is why the English-speaking world has such a politicized mistrust of scientists (and perhaps why India avoided it). While tracking the development of this mistrust is easy in the United States, the politics of Australia, Canada, and the UK have some significant structural differences that would seem to suggest common cultural features might underly the tendency.
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