Unicorn Riot just hosted a leak from the III% Security Force’s Discord server, which is available to researchers here. Alongside the leak, they put out a very detailed analysis and context article that is well worth the read, too. The leaked messages cover January through April of 2021, totaling 8,358 messages.
This MilitiaWatch article, therefore, is intended to be a short companion piece to a Unicorn Riot leak and article. The group’s Discord served as a brief but important tool for the group after waves of bans and deplatforms spanning Facebook, Zello, YouTube, and more. This MilitiaWatch article serves to provide some background context but will briefly engage with the leaks further below.
It has been less than a year since MilitiaWatch last posted about III% schisms in an article featuring confrontations with the NFAC and neo-Confederate organizing in Georgia. The article is available here:
That article itself is a tracing of developments in the III% Security Force since a June 2019 update on a schism in the group, which is available here:
Lastly, following that 2019 split, an organization coming out of that split itself saw major fractures at the start of 2020. An article on that is available here:
These historic posts on the MilitiaWatch blog indicate what is certainly a reality within the III% world. One major enduring feature of this microcosm of the III% world, the III% Security Force, is these fractures, of which another major split recently occurred.
Around 7 May 2021, the III% Security Force went through yet another split. This was revealed by the Atlanta Antifascists on Twitter in a thread available here.
This newest splinter is another attempted nationwide organization called the “Patriot Defence Force” (PDF, sometimes written “Patriot Defense Force” or “Patriotic Defense Force”), which was initially another name for the III% Security Force as they attempted to move away from the III% label to attract activists from within the broader “2A” community. This was a thin veneer, as the PDF even had references to the III%SF in their bio on Twitter and elsewhere:
Jayme “Chaos Six” Dawson runs the PDF website and has been working on a lot of III% Security Force’s online web infrastructure, which included everything from reinstalling the createaforum service on the PDF website after they banned the Security Force to creating a video landing page on the PDF site referred to as “MilitiaTube”. Dawson was also part of a 3 April 2021 filing to establish the “Three Percent Security Force Inc” as a nonprofit organization.
The Articles of Incorporation for the III% Security Force Inc nonprofit features Dawson as the registered agent and Chris “General BlooDAgenT” Hill and Timothy “Sargeant Nightmareborn” Johnson as additional incorporators. In messages to the Atlanta Antifascists, Dawson apparently told the group that he was working to remove Hill from the legal body and described his former ‘general’ as “egotistical and unstable”.
The group used to have a landing page description with text that heavily borrows from QAnon postings identified by Travis View from a January 2020 Tampa QAnon rally. Both are compared side by side below, with a documentation screenshot from the Atlanta Antifascists at the left:
After being called out for QAnon plagiarism, the PDF jumped to change the text to something else. In the process, they also plagiarized another source, the Arizona Rangers. Here are these texts side-by-side:
The words are essentially the same, and the PDF even went so far as to include the Arizona Rangers’ gear icon in their new site copy. Perhaps a mistake telling of the webmaster’s literal copy+paste of the text, the hyperlinks lead to the same Arizona Rangers pages linked in the corresponding text in the original.
The group has redone the text on their main site, now claiming to adhere to “Four Foundations”, which are: Prepare, Support, Unite, and Defend. Each of these includes a survivalist and armed self-defense component, which maybe more represents a slight return to the militia movement’s prepper origins moreso than any major ideological divergence from the III% Security Force itself.
The PDF’s initial text indicates connections to QAnon type ideology, which maybe isn’t necessary to discuss at length here. A detail that is important, though, is that several major III% Security Force actors are known for their QAnon beliefs or for sharing QAnon propaganda. Perhaps more interesting to the potential direction of this new split, is that of the homage through temporary plagiarism that the group is now paying to the Arizona Rangers. Therefore, lets look to the Arizona Rangers, specifically their operations, history, and what they look like now.
On the Arizona Rangers
The Arizona Rangers were founded in 1901 by Roosevelt’s Rough Riders* but dissolved before 1910. During this time period, much of their activity was strikebreaking violence against Mexican mineworkers, culminating in a clash in Cananea, Sonora that left 25 dead and dozens more injured. After the group’s 1909 dissolution, many Arizona Rangers stayed in law enforcement.
*Note: the Rough Riders were the originators of and partners to numerous other domestic paramilitary organizations, including the Red Shirts who helped to lead a racist coup in North Carolina just before the formation of the Arizona Rangers.
In 1957, the Arizona Rangers were reincorporated as a nonprofit, in consultation with four original members of the 1901 organization. Nearly 50 years later, the state of Arizona would recognize the group and require the all-volunteer group to complete police training.
Today, they still act as auxiliaries to Arizona police under devolved regional bodies. The group has a .gov domain online and wears uniforms that look quite similar to Arizona police, complete with shoulder patches and metal star badges.
Below are two images. At the left are two armed and uniformed members of the Arizona Rangers at a Rotary meeting in a Phoenix suburb (via YourValley). At the right are officers in uniform from the Phoenix Police awarding a member School Resource Officer for his service (via City of Phoenix).
If some contingent of the III% Security Force sees themselves as a sort of national organization version of the Arizona Rangers, this could mean some potentially troubling developments into the future. It could mean that some of those involved in a group that has been spreading conspiracy theories about COVID-19, elections, and their political adversaries (or otherwise directly engaging in anti-democratic actions) are now happy to act as informal auxiliaries of the police and other state security apparatuses.
This is not to say that individual police or indeed entire police forces are not often far-right actors who, like right-wing social movements, make social alliances against their political enemies. But seeing some of the content of III% Security Force chats, for example, should shock potential future partners for an organization like the PDF.
This is a good opportunity to delve into the III% Security Force Discord leaks.
On the Discord Leak
Unicorn Riot just put out a leak from the III% Security Force Discord, alongside an article that is well worth a read and available here. It’s perhaps worthwhile to discuss some of the contents of that leak here.
Recruitment Methods
Jayme Dawson, in the leak, describes the specific utility of establishing the 501(c)3 organization to cover for the III% Security Force, posting in the week after submitting articles of incorporation the following:
It’s meaningful to note that he writes “to the public we are a company that provides military-style survival training and disaster preparation training”, a popular money-making scheme for many veterans organizations seeking to profit off of military experience. He seems to indicate that there’s some difference between the appearance of the organization “[to] the public” versus ‘in private’ or ‘in reality’.
Jayme Dawson’s post comes within a couple of days of another public strategy put forward by the militia’s leader. After being banned from places like Facebook or Zello or YouTube, the III% Security Force attempted to push new recruitment methods, of which the 501(c)3 is likely one. Another, per Chris Hill himself, is the masking of the militia name to try to attract non-militia activists on Facebook or on Zello:
Hill’s early April call to his group to create Facebook groups under their accounts led to the creation of multiple Facebook pages using titles such as “CONSTITUTIONAL SANCTUARY ORG”, which was administrated by Anne “Honey Badger” Hyatt and moderated by Joseph “Smokin Joe” Edwards.
About a week after the page was brought to public attention, Facebook removed the “SANCTUARY” page for Terms of Service violations.
A Zello channel, “american rights”, was set up by Trent “bigdog-75”, alongside others like “Mobile 2a” and “Mobile 2A Interviews”. A screenshot of the first is below:
Another Zello channel, “mobile 2a” was set up by the militia’s leader, Chris Hill, who took as his title so many years ago “General Blood Agent”, here written as “Gen. BLooDAgenT”:
All three Zello channels are still online at the time of writing. The largest, “american rights” has 91 subscribers, admittedly much lower than the 1049 subscribers one of the III% Security Force channels had in mid-October 2020. Some writing about those Zello channels is available here and here.
Often violent discussions
The Discord, like many channels that militia groups believe to be private or otherwise “secure” was full of references to violence. A few standouts are included below. Here’s a multi-member discussion about what round size to use to kill a judge:
This exchange includes a “mike1976”, “Deadwood”, “Tannerite”, “TALLMAN”, and “CottonMouth” with varying levels of engagement with the notion of assassinating a judge.
In another case, a member merges anti-Black views with murder fantasies aimed at “white liberals” to “pump our numbers up”:
This member, “WNDWLKR III%DEMON”, perhaps deserves a closer eye given some of his other posts.
Member profile: WNDWLKR
Windwalker, a III% Security Force member whose account name is often written “WNDWLKR”, is an Ohio Security Force member that has been highly active on III%SF communications channels for a while now. He’s a member who is also unafraid to make aggressive statements on the group’s Discord:
In the Discord leak, Windwalker had also added “DEMON” to the end of his username. Under this amended moniker, he offered the popular Thomas Jefferson quote about the “tree of liberty” just before posting a photo of a handwritten note of “Blood of Patriots” that included Boogaloo adherent Duncan Lemp and Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Windwalker, in a discussion with “Redrooster” and “Scorpion”, said he had “made my peace with my creator im read for this” in a discussion about killing all “antufa”.
Windwalker followed up, saying he had “no problem with the issue [of killing his enemies on the left] or remorse” before posting shortly thereafter about his crockpot and how there “is no room for compromise ,there is no road back without victory”.
Windwalker is one of only a few Ohio members who remained in the III% Security Force in the time following the A.C.E. III% split, during which the local leader, Skylar Steward, left the organization in a falling out with Hill. It’s unclear if Windwalker was involved back then, but in late 2020 his disagreements with another Ohio-based III% Security member led to the other member leaving the organization after shouting over the Zello chat he would shortly thereafter leave.
The member in question that Windwalker had drama with is Dan Kish, a former Ohio III% Security Force member who notably attempted to start a group in 2018 called the “Lone Wolves”. The Lone Wolves III% would continue activity up through the beginning of 2019, during which Dan continued posting propaganda for the group. For a bit more information on the Lone Wolves, a 2018 MilitiaWatch article covers some of the group’s involvement with a PA militia event.
On the splits overall
Here is a graphic of splits and demobilizations within the III% movement that the III% Security Force finds itself within. From left to right is the flow of time (not to scale), with splits from trunks representing the chronological order of the movement’s splintering or integration.
Off of the III% Security Force, we have seen the following splits in chronological order:
- The establishment of the American Constitutional Elite (A.C.E.) III% and the Declaration of Restoration movement
- The establishment of the Georgia III% Martyrs
- The establishment of the Patriot Defence Force, whose profile leads this article
In each of these cases, a major aspect of the group leaving the III% Security Force has been frustration at the way that the leadership runs the organization, specifically with regard to temper.
There are other major movements that split from the III% Security Force or were otherwise formed from the group’s disintegration that may be mentioned in a future article, but the splits so far detailed above have led to multiple other further splits, which include in chronological order:
- The establishment of the Ohio Patriotz III% and Texas Three Percenters in part caused by ruptures in the A.C.E. III%
- The establishment of the Georgia III% Guardians due to ruptures in the III% Martyrs
It is still unclear why the A.C.E. III% fell apart, but it seems like running a national organization was too much stress for the primary chapters that defected to form it. The Guardians appear to have split from the Martyrs in part due to leadership from the Martyrs kicking out several key members of the group regarding aggressive behavior during the summer of 2020.
But some of these groups have also seen reintegrations, which are very rare for the militia movement, generally speaking. The American Brotherhood of Patriots III%, essentially the armed movement of the American Patriots USA (APUSA) started by Chester Dole and including some III% Security Force defectors, was part of a brokered unity summit that also included the Martyrs and APUSA just after the election.
This union was claimed to be part of a bid to create a more durable militia organization out of several groups that had smaller audiences and smaller levels of impact. Doles also said the group was seeking to push for Georgia to secede from the rest of the US and militias outside of Georgia have occasionally reported that Doles also reached out to them in order to create a broader coalition that has yet to materialize.
Much of the III% Security Force has gone dark since the split. Chris Hill did an interview with a neo-Confederate militia organizer about a month ago, during which he hinted at an interest in armed combat. The group’s Gab page has been silent since the end of May, the group deleted their Rumble account, and the leader has only posted a few times in June on a TikTok clone about surviving COVID, Father’s Day, and (most recently) videos of July 4th fireworks.
Only time will tell the fate of this ever-splitting organization, both of the core cell and its fractal network of competing movements. Right now is perhaps the greatest challenge they have faced yet, though.