Greetings, MW reader, and warm wishes for your start to 2026.
There’s a lot of news happening right now, mostly to do with state violence. This post includes very little reference to those news items, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important.
That being said, there are a few important stories from the militia world this past month that are covered briefly in this news round-up, notably:
- VCDL held another Lobby Day in Richmond, and Boogaloo adherents present donned Hawaiian shirts again
- Stewart Rhodes’s relaunch continues to flop, despite what you might read
- Green Bay III% fanboy joins police force, chief defends his extremist tattoo
If you’d like to read the Yearly from a month ago, covering some key threads from 2025, you can also read that at the link below:
This year, the Virginia Citizens Defense League Lobby Day on MLK Day in Richmond, Virginia, brought more people to their event than the last couple of years. The Virginia Kekoas, who have been a staple of such gatherings for years now, opted to wear Hawaiian shirts again, reassociating themselves visually with the “Boogaloo” movement. When asked about ICE, most of the Boogaloo adherents waffled and dodged the question, instead presenting elected Virginia Democrats as the ‘tyranny’ they oppose. Some Kekoas later clarified their positions in direct opposition to ICE, but it was not the vibe on the ground in Richmond. Even the leader of a group taking the name of the Black Panthers spouted conservative talking points, referring to the undocumented as “illegals” and declaring that the conflict with ICE was “not our fight”.
Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, attended the VCDL gathering, speaking to the press while hanging out with Ivan Raiklin (the two of whom have attended a handful of recent political events together). Rhodes, at any opportunity given, called for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. While there has been a lot of hay made over the Insurrection Act, and especially Rhodes’s constant refrains on it, it doesn’t seem like Trump is really listening to Rhodes at the moment. As researchers, writers, academics, and journalists, we should be very careful not to overplay the “relaunch of the Oath Keepers”. Back in November, this “relaunch” was covered as part of the MW Monthly for that month, which you can read here. In the two months since — while there isn’t much data — it seems at least empirically that this has been a failure: the Oath Keepers’ GiveSendGo has raised a meager $2,300 of their $75,000 goal. They haven’t updated their “classes” schedule on their website since November, either.
It’s now been a year since Trump’s massive J6 pardons and commutations. On his Substack, Tim Dickinson detailed what some of the more prominent (extreme) J6 participants have been up to in the year since, which is worth the read if you’re interested. Notably, Stewart Rhodes is the only militia leader covered, which should offer some indication of how the Patriot Movement still struggles to regain the organizational ground it lost after January 6. The movement isn’t eradicated, but it is deeply responsive to what is going on in domestic politics.
This brings up a point — it seems extremely unlikely that militia groups (or Proud Boys or Patriot Front members, for that matter) are joining ICE in any meaningful sense. Some groups, like specific chapters of the Proud Boys who have engaged in “psyops” (media manipulation) in the past, may be boasting about joining this agency to drive headlines and waste reporter time. The reality is that the things many of the more authoritarian members of the militia movement (largely indistinct from the ‘libertarian’ elements since the III% splits of 2016) likely see what ICE is doing and see no need to mobilize because the agency is enacting policy they support. While this seems obviously hypocritical, it is tantamount to understand that this isn’t actually about principles, but about power. The armed right sees domestic rights and autonomy largely as a zero-sum game. Until ICE (or the police) come after their kith and kin, they will likely continue to look the other way (with few exceptions). You’ll likely still see far more “The ATF is Gay” type patches, memes, and otherwise than you’ll see “Fuck ICE” ones in this world.
In the time since ICE killed Pretti, militia leaders and leaders of other right-wing groups have had all sorts of things to say:
- Woody Clendenen, a founder of the Cottonwood Militia, said “you never have a right to impede law enforcement,” and Dan Scoville, who leads the Cottonwood Militia these days, said Pretti “chose to be there and put himself in a dangerous situation.”
- Ammon Bundy, who wrote a 6-page essay last fall deriding other Patriot Movement leaders for looking the other way regarding ICE violence, called Pretti’s slaying “sickening” and said, “When it comes to the more humanitarian side of it, I think the left has it much more correct than the nationalist right.”
- Cody “VK Sasquatch” Beckner of the Virginia Kekoas described the administration as “tyrannical” for justifying killing Pretti over his being armed. Eddie “VK Ice” Ray said, “ICE escalated when they should have de-escalated.”
- Enrique Tarrio, who led the Proud Boys through some of their most violent moments, said of ICE, “We’ve kind of gotten what we want, right? There’s no reason to fucking protest” because the federal government was doing their work for them.
Speaking of actual examples of militia supporters joining the police: several weeks back, the Green Bay Police posted an image of a recruit taking a pledge. He had a III% tattoo clearly visible on the inside of the bicep of his raised arm. After (reasonable) public outcry, the chief of police came out to defend the cadet. It is unlikely that this means that the police department is now a III% cadre (any moreso than the day before) or that III% adherents are rushing to join police departments (they have more often coordinated with friendly officers than sought to join themselves), but this serves as a worrying trend of normalization and reintegration of extremist elements within officially sanctioned spaces.