American Doom
Right-wing militias are gathering for war if they lose in November
I'm Justin Glaw, writer and journalist, and I've spent my career chronicling the violence, unrest, and chaos of American life. On this podcast, I'll discuss the events roiling this complex and troubling country, and speak with some of the people trying to make sense of the madness that pervades our world. This is American Doom. Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of American Doom. Today we're talking with Katie Paul of the Tech Transparency Project. Katie's behind all sorts of interesting work over at TTP, but today I wanted to talk with her about the rise of right-wing militias on Facebook. Following the attack on the Capitol on January 6, Facebook briefly cracked down on these groups because they were planning the attack on Facebook. But since then, they've come back and they may be bigger than ever. Katie told me recently that a video she saw about a joint training exercise by militia members was the largest gathering of militia members that she's seen in the last four years of tracking these groups. It's really troubling stuff, but that's what we're all about here. So let's dig in. All right. Hey, everyone. We're here with Katie Paul today who's the director of the Tech Transparency Project. Katie, tell us a little bit about what you do. So my background is not in technology. It's actually an anthropology, but a lot of the work we do that looks at harms of big tech companies involves ethnographic research. That looks at everything from trafficking to extremism and over the past few years, domestic extremism in particular. Okay. Good. I'd like to talk about that. It's an interesting topic, not a very light-hearted one, I guess. But you've been reporting on right-wing militia groups lately, and there was a big story that came out and wired that was based on your research back in May about a lot of these groups openly organizing on Facebook. Can you tell us a little bit about who these groups are and sort of what their goals are? Absolutely. So I think it's important to keep in mind that this isn't something that's new. These groups have been using Facebook in particular as a way to organize and particularly recruit over the past few years. It started after, largely, started around 2018 is when we saw kind of a surge in these types of groups. A lot of them are militia groups. Some of those are highly localized militia in really rural areas of just a handful of guys. Some of them are national militia that have branches in different states. And over the past 12 months or so, the American Patriots 3% militia in particular have been really aggressively recruiting on Facebook. Notably, this group has been banned from Facebook since 2020, but it's just a symptom of a bigger issue of the company not enforcing its policies really at all. And these groups have noticed and have taken advantage because Facebook still remains the most successful platform in terms of reaching a wider audience and pulling people into your cause. And in this case, that causes anti-government militia movements. So what they get banned, like Facebook bans them, and then they just start a new page with like a slightly different name or something like that pretty much? Exactly. Or, you know, a purposeful misspelling. And that was what we largely saw in 2020 when they would get removed or try to reconvene. What's notable about these recent ones is they don't even bother trying to hide it anymore. The pages will just be the name of the militia. They'll have militia in the name. They will explicitly recruit. They will talk about, you know, fighting till the death against tyranny. It's pretty obvious and explicit what they are. They use a lot of familiar iconography. So it's very clear that the platform is not addressing this situation. And, you know, considering the fact that Facebook and many other platforms have laid off thousands of people over the past two years or so, particularly in trust and safety and the moderation side in favor of using their certainly not accurate AI systems, instead, we see a big research of these groups and in a way that it's clear that this particular platform is critical for recruiting. Right. Yeah. So, you know, Facebook obviously has a huge reach and that's why these that's why these groups are on there, right? Like they know that it is probably the best way to reach these people. And frankly, like the demo of somebody who's going to join a right wing militia is probably somebody of the age where they're like on Facebook constantly. How many people are, first of all, how many militias are you like actively monitoring slash you've found that are active recently and of those groups, how many people are we talking who are involved in them, at least that you know of from the online paper trail? So that's a big variety. So there are the Facebook pages for militia groups, which are totally public. And for those, now some of these pages are no longer active, but we've continued to be tracking them over the years and have about 900 and some pages for militia groups that I've collected since 2020. Some of those started earlier than 2020, but that was when they started collecting. And then for the private groups, which is where some of the more open coordination does occur, there are I have I think about 550 Facebook groups and I'd say about half of those have been created since January 6, 2021. So that's an important date, not just because of you know, the what happened on that day with regard to the insurrection, but that's also a day where Facebook made a lot of promises that it was going to be trying to address this issue more. And yet we see many of these groups. Now some of the groups could have just, as I mentioned, they could be really local and have just a handful of guys, maybe five to 10. Some of them are much larger. They have hundreds or even thousands of people. Now the ones that have thousands of people, not all those people are going to go join the field training exercises or things like that. But they are the type of people who are interested in that particular ideology in a way that for a big event, they might go show support. And I think January 6 was a good example of how not everybody involved in January 6 in the attack on the Capitol was involved in a domestic extremist group. However, the groups charged with conspiracy, the three percenters among them organized that and relied on the kind of mob mentality aspect of, you know, like-minded people when it came to the overthrow of government. And that's where we've seen Facebook continue to remain critical. In fact, for the three percenters, some of them, their cover photo on Facebook will be a- for their profiles, their personal profiles for different state leaders will be a recruiting post for the American Patriots three percent. And it will explicitly say that you have to download Telegram to be accepted into the group for further communication. But they're saying that on Facebook to get the people. They have to pull them from Facebook and then move them to the Telegram. And that's where we see how the platform really serves as a critical pipeline in terms of taking people that wouldn't otherwise maybe go looking for a militia group to join. But perhaps they're feeling more disenfranchised and it makes it much easier for militia leaders to capitalize on those people and pull them into their ideology. It also seems like it is a clear line between, you know, whatever. You can have your Tea Party Patriots Facebook page or your voter fraud Facebook page and that's all protected by free speech and Facebook can't really do anything about it. But it seems like there's a pretty clear line between that type of stuff and people getting sucked into that and getting sucked into like an actual extremist militia organization, whether it's this right wing domestic terrorism stuff or the other stuff that you've discovered like the ISIS groups, like having a political page talking about stuff that's protected by the First Amendment is one thing, but this is beyond that, right? Absolutely. There's a very clear line. There are thousands and thousands of Patriot pages on Facebook. Those are not the same as the Patriot movement, which is a faction of the militia movement. And what we look at in particular and what I've been tracking is not just, you know, does this group say that it's a militia? No, it's not a historical reenactment group. These are groups that are posting photos of their patches. These are groups that are explicitly recruiting people, asking people to join them. They're posting videos and photos of their field training exercises that they meet monthly. And so this is groups that are actively preparing for a future event. They call it the shit hit the fan event. I don't know if I can say that or not. But and they use the SHTF as the acronym for that. And that's a way to reference like the Civil War aspect that they are preparing for without actually saying the word Civil War to trigger the algorithm. Right. Okay. So, another question I have, you know, obviously like a story, you do all this reporting, all this research, the story comes out, Facebook takes the pages down, right? I mean, that's sort of like a general pattern. And then I assume that those pages come back up just so like people understand sort of how this works. Like Facebook sort of gets caught and then they're like, Oh, whoops, sorry, you know, they take them down and then they go back off, right? Yeah, that's the famous Facebook MO with pretty much everything harmful. We've seen the same thing with wildlife trafficking, you know, really you throw out any particular harm in there. And that's the MO. They say that they have a policy against it. So whoopsie, we miss this one. We take it down when we become aware of it. And then they remove it and there's no proactive enforcement. So the group just pop up again. I'd say the most famous example in terms of the extremist movements where we've seen this is the Boogaloo militia movement, which was largely in 2020, but just wave after wave, even when we would report on it, Facebook would remove a bunch of groups. They kind of re, you know, reorganize their naming system that they use for one another and start up again and start up again. And it's because there was no continuous or proactive enforcement. And I think it's important to know, you know, TTP is a small organization. I'm one person and I can manually monitor and track all of these, certainly more effectively than Facebook's AI is doing. So it's not a matter of the company's inability to do so. It's not a matter of the lack of resources. We know they have plenty of money. And the expertise is out there. They are just choosing not to utilize it and apply it to these types of issues. I mean, is that as simple as that there is no financial incentive for them to stop? I mean, people on the platform is money in their pockets, whether they're on the platform, looking at guitar stuff or, or ISIS stuff or boogaloo stuff, right? They want to keep people on there, keep them engaged and keep them seeing what they already want to see, right? Well, not just that, there's no repercussions. There's no financial repercussions, even a $500 million FTC fine is a drop in the bucket. They make that in like, you know, a few months, not even a whole quarter. And there's, so there's that, there's no regulatory fine, there's protection from civil legal liability. I mean, really, there's a shield all around. So there's nothing financially incentivizing them to address this. Now, they were much more vocal about, you know, their efforts to address these problems back in 2020, they were Facebook and other tech CEOs were getting pulled before Congress much more often. And because of the strong bipartisan support on that ish on the issues of tech regulation, which we're still seeing strong bipartisan support, astonishingly, but the regulation hasn't happened and all of those efforts in 2020 were to prepare for, you know, or save off regulation and the regulation never came. So they just started laying off the teams that address these issues, including teams like their election integrity team. Right. I, it never ceases to amaze me that we are like eight years out from everybody making a big deal about foreign interference in our elections by misinformation on Facebook and a mere eight years after all of that, what people from both sides of the aisle were concerned about this. We're now just like, oh, yeah, you know, misinformation on Facebook, election denier stuff like that's all just like an accepted part of our reality now, it feels like. And I guess, including some of this malicious stuff, we're like, Facebook isn't going to do anything about it, the only people who really have the power to hold them accountable are politicians don't really appear willing to do anything about it. And part of that is probably because one of the parties supports this, you know, type of behavior. But it just seems like how quickly we forget and accept things as part of our new reality. I want to ask you specifically about some of these groups, and I want to talk about the group that you had sent me that video of the field training exercise. Tell me a little bit about who that group is, and just so people know, and maybe we'll try to get the video up on this, maybe not, but it's a video of like at least a few dozen armed guys doing some sort of exercise and the tagline for the video is now is the time to join a motherfucking militia, not a political party. We came into this world screaming covered in blood and we'll be leaving the same way. No retreat, no surrender. I think whoever wrote that probably has never been horrifically injured on the field of battle or they probably wouldn't be writing something like that. But who is this group? So that video was shared by a member of the 3%ers militia group, and there were a lot more than a few dozen guys for that particular field training exercise. It's actually in the monitoring I've done one of the largest gatherings I've seen of these guys for training. Notably, that particular event that the video was from was a multi-state field training, which means people traveled from lots of other states from, you know, their militia factions and other states to all join together for this particular field training exercise. And in addition to that, the text of the actual post said 3% slash light foot militia. Light foot militia is another militia separate from the 3%ers that has factions, Idaho is one of their biggest factions in Pennsylvania, and these different national militia and their state factions are aligning for broader training. So this is where it doesn't, these groups are not all, while they may have different leaders or they may be small or regional, they're not all fractured. They are coming together under their single ideology and even training together. What are they training for? They're training for their shit, hit the family. Yeah. And, you know, I think something that for me is really striking is that in 2020, when I was, you know, really heavily monitoring all of this, I did not see this kind of organizing or training, it's at least not in a way that was, you know, publicly advertised on major platforms until probably the end of the summer, closer to the election, and it's certainly after the election in preparation for January 6th. But we don't even have the conventions yet. We have not even had the formal conventions to select the candidates, even though we know who they're going to be for the presidential election, and that these guys are already deep into coordinated, multi-state field training exercises is incredibly concerning. It's a level of coordination and organizing that I did not see at this scale or with this level of organizing at the same time four years ago. So for this specific field training exercise that you've got, I mean, how many people are we talking about? Hundreds, hundreds of people, right? It looked like a couple hundred, yeah, it's the videos, you know, as it continues to zoom out, it just kind of keeps going, it's a small army of people, and I'm sure people that aren't familiar with these issues will say, "Oh, well, the National Guard's bigger, there's more police in different cities." This is all correct, however, for January 6th, keep in mind that the staff, the guys that were geared up in their militia gear with the 3%ers and their, you know, radios ready to go, there were only about 10 of them. It does not take a lot of guys with the willpower and the weaponry to overtake a few officers, especially when those police are not equipped, and then you add in the kind of mob mentality of whatever, you know, particular group they may be around, and it's a completely different ballgame. So I think that that's where we have to remember, I mean, even independent of this issue, we have mass shootings in America where dozens of people can be killed by a single gunman. These guys have that kind of firepower, and so that's the kind of thing when you start seeing them really organizing and gathering, that's what we should be focused on and concerned about. For instance, the wired report that you mentioned, one of the leaders of the Arkansas Confederate states, 3%, who really has multiple profiles and a fairly decent following on these platforms and largely operates in private groups. In a recent post when somebody asked about, in one of his groups, about the election and what's coming up, he simply replied, "Ballot box or ammo box," making clear that if the election does not turn out the way that they feel, it should that the exercising of their Second Amendment rights is the way to solve that problem, and it's a pretty widely held belief among a lot of these guys. And that jives with, you know, what I see from the election denier officials that I research, and then, you know, in the process of researching them, I come across just a lot of everyday Americans who are basically like, "Yeah, political violence sounds good to me." You know, if Trump doesn't win in November, A, it's because the Democrats cheated, and B, we're going to do something with it by any means necessary. Yeah, so a couple of things occurred to me there. Yeah, you're totally right that like it only takes one or two guys with a vest and an AR showing up at an election office to overpower whatever off-duty cop they have there. And I know you may not be able to answer this next question because it's not specifically the focus of your research, but I am curious about whether or not there's any indication as far as local or federal law enforcement knowledge of these groups or any sort of preparedness measures that law enforcement might be taking because it seems like it would be important for them to do so, considering what happened last time. Do you have any indication that law enforcement is at all taking this threat seriously? I personally don't have any indication of that. I don't know how different localized law enforcement are organizing. I do know in some areas, for instance, I will not name the particular militia, but a localized militia that was operating on Facebook for a very long time that I had been following would hold their weekly meetings at the sheriff's office. So depending on the community, there's always a concern that authorities could be involved. This varies widely, and there are certainly lots of states. Even before January 6th, there was the big Second Amendment rally in Richmond, Virginia, and that was a lot of militia really going there to kind of flex and organize, and that was the first real show of force of this particular movement. Now, it was a peaceful rally, it was more about, but I think it was for the movement. It also illustrated to them the numbers that they actually have when they see each other together as opposed to these fractured ideologies all over the internet. So I don't know what authorities are doing to prepare for this, but there's certainly a need to, and I know that ahead of January 6th, there were lots of reports from all kinds of researchers and experts on these issues to the Metropolitan Police, to the Capitol Police, to the FBI. It's unclear where those reports go, and for something that's becoming more commonplace like these election threats, it would be really helpful if there were a dedicated reporting line for these types of issues, where resources could be dedicated to protect poll workers, for instance, who have become the target of all kinds of threats from these people. People working the polls at their local election office should not have to worry about if they need private security to get home, most of them are volunteers. And that's the kind of thing that I, unfortunately, I don't think that we're prepared for as a nation right now, especially seeing that, you know, this is, and it's important to remember, this is something that's happened for a long time. These militia, some of them are newer, but the idea of militia movements in America has been around for decades. The difference here is that this is turbocharged by these platforms and people that would otherwise be lone wolves, or, you know, not have that coordination of a well-trained or high-powered group now have that, and it's only possible in that way because of these platforms. And in some cases, in many, most cases now, I'd say we're not seeing militia that exists in the real world, and they're like, hey, let's set up a Facebook page for our group. The ones we see now start online, find out how many people they can find locally that are like-minded that want to work with them, and then they go train in person. And that makes the platform, Facebook, in particular, really the birthplace for a lot of these militia that then go operate in the real world. And it's nothing new. I mean, we see terrorist groups do it, too, but the failure to address the problem just makes it exponentially worse the longer it goes on. Right. Another thing that, as you were talking there about how these groups form and how we've always had right-wing extremism and militia groups and domestic terrorism and all of that stuff, what also seems different about this time around is that it's also turbocharged by the nature of the fact that there is a single rallying cry, and that is the forthcoming election. And I think we're before these groups, they had a lot of stuff that they were fighting against, you know, the sort of general anti-government stuff. But like, now we have- and correct me if I'm wrong about this, but like, it seems like the singular focus of a lot of these groups is rooted in denying the result of the 2020 election, and making sure that it doesn't happen again/Trump is reelected in 2024, whereas before, I don't know, you had Timothy McVay in Oklahoma City ranting about some anti-government stuff, you had the- like whatever, like these groups have existed, but now they're all like, this is our cause, and they've got some dates to look forward to. They've got Election Day, they've got the Certification Day, like January 6 Redux, and they've got Inauguration Day, which are all target points for militia activity, right? Absolutely. Although I think, you know, the rallying cry, I think it's important, even independent of this election, to- it's evolved in such a way to remove any particular politician from it, including Trump, because the broader issue is about the delegitimization of the government. And by saying that the election is false, or that it was rigged, or whatever that is, it's part of the broader cause to delegitimize the government. And I think that's important because the issue of these groups, especially after 2021, has been very politicized and partisan because there are leans toward a particular direction. However, as politicians of both parties have tried to stand up and, you know, maintain certain protections of the state, we see the lines blurred on who is worthy of threats or ridicule and who is not. COVID started kind of leaning that way when someone like Mike DeWine in Ohio, who is a Republican governor, was trying to implement, you know, masking mandates and stop the spread of COVID in Ohio, he was getting death threats. And, you know, people outside of his house, this is a, like, a long time to red Republican, you know, red state Republican governor, I'm from Ohio, and that is, you know, that's an issue. And, obviously, after the January 6th committee, people like Liz Cheney, who, 10 years ago, no one would ever think of as too left for some of the conservatives. So I think taking the political parties out of it is important because those lines are so blurred now. It's about who is operating as a function of the government and versus who is going rogue, kind of. Right. Who is the one that-- Right. I mean, that is the general-- Exactly. That is the rallying cry of these groups. And, I mean, you're right, DeWine, Liz Cheney, we can say, Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensberger in Georgia. Adam Kinzinger. I mean, there's so many, the Arizona election officials that I think, and right, like you said, Raffensberger and Georgia, I mean, these are, these are long-time Republicans. These are not liberal people. Because they're not liberal people at all. No, no, no. And that is where, that's where I think it's so important to take politics out of it because no politician, regardless of their party, is immune to the threats from these groups because as a politician, they are still a function of the government that these groups see as a threat. And as such, game on for anybody is really what it is. And I think, you know, I have also in this work, I've really tried to remain, you know, nonpartisan. I have looked for liberal militia, I think, out of my data set, there's maybe two. And I have looked at, you know, for socialist rifle clubs in Antifa, those groups are not openly calling for violence on these major platforms. I'm focusing on where I see calls for violence. Right. And, you know, include things that are explicit calls for violence. And it's unfortunately coming from one particular group. That's not to say that there aren't other groups out there that may be violent, but in terms of how publicly and widely they're making those calls, we're simply just not seeing it on the major platforms and nowhere near the scale that we see from a lot of these anti-government militia. But this is, I think the last thing I would like to discuss here, but can you describe a little bit of that scale of the explicit calls for political violence? Because I think I have an idea of what it is, and I know what it is for the folks that I look into and that I write about, but how can you help us understand what the scope and the scale is of those explicit calls for political violence are as we sit here today? So, you know, I gave the example of the bullet box or ammo box. That is coming from a state leader, 43% or militia. And that was something he posted in a group with like about 2,000 members. So that's the kind of thing where even if people are not part of that militia movement, they latch onto that ideology, it makes them more likely to act. I mean, time and again, we've seen January 6th, you know, prisoners who have been charged and found guilty, who have talked about, in fact, one even testified before the committee, talked about how they fell down these rabbit holes online. They got really riled up by the language and, you know, looking back, they realized it was wrong. And I think that that's, you know, there are a lot of people that are stuck in those rabbit holes and part of it is also just being unaware of the manipulation of the platforms and that these tools are designed to psychologically manipulate you, increasingly show you more extreme content, whatever that may be. And so, you know, the scale is on that front. It's very difficult. But the calls for violence are very explicit. There are still memes circulating about hanging politicians, which, ha ha, that's funny until January 6th, 2021, when you had a gallows erected outside of the Capitol and chance for a hang Mike Pence, and it wasn't an art piece, it was a functioning gallows. These are individuals who mean what they say. And so, you know, a lot of the posts locked and loaded, ready to exercise my second amendment right on November 5th, that's the kind of thing where it's very concerning. And now, they're not going to say, let's all go swarm this or let's fight that because they all feel like they're being watched after January 6th. But there are very specific dog whistles like the bullet box or the ballot box or ammo box. That's a fairly common phrase used among these groups to signal that they are going to be armed and prepared for the November election. Can I presume then that because it's the first date in this sort of trilogy of important dates for figuring out who our next president is, November 5th, January 6th, 2.0, whatever that date is, I don't know if it's still January 6th or not, and then inauguration day on January 20th. But I presume that November 5th, when people are saying we are armed and ready, they're probably mentioning that date in some of these comments. They're mentioning that date, and this is not like take over the Capitol. The bigger concerns, at least in my view, just from what I've seen so far, and this could totally change come fall, but are the local levels, the state capitals, you know, people are, you know, in early November, probably not going to be traveling out of state to do anything. The county election board office or something like that, maybe. Exactly. And they're, some of these groups are hyper local and very involved in their local, you know, politics and putting in the most extreme people. I mean, yeah, the county election board, that's the perfect type of, I mean, that's the type of thing that, you know, we see the proud boys, we saw the attacks at election boards in Arizona after the results there. And I think that's exactly exactly. And that's where I think the most immediate threat will be. So that is where we're going to see, you know, it's the local level. And that's where people, I think, are also at the most risk, the election workers, the civil servants that are just doing their jobs, who really, in earlier times, never needed any sort of high level security or protection. Now they do. Right. And it's just a question of if local governments are prepared for that. All right. Thank you so much for doing this, Katie. Where can people find your work? You can find our work at the tech transparency project.org. We have quite a few reports over the years about militia and big tech platforms and also a lot of other informative things on tech that everybody should probably know, but may not be aware of. All right, Katie Paul, thanks so much. Appreciate the time. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you for listening to American Doom. This podcast is just a part of my work as a writer and journalist, to keep up or at least to try to, because chaos and speed are the two primary drivers of my work. You can subscribe to my newsletter on Substack. Just search for American Doom there. And you'll find the investigations and stories that I cover. Coming up on my newsletter are more dives into elected deniers working as local election officials across the country. This is work I've been doing mostly by myself for the last four years, and it's not possible without your support. American Doom is the only place that you'll find reporting on local election denier officials. 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