MilitiaWatch would like to extend our deepest condolences to the friends, family, and communities impacted by the brutal attacks on Atlanta-area spas this past week. It’s an absolute tragedy and our hearts ache for those impacted.
This week, the update features the following and more:
Ammon Bundy spends night in jail for missing court date due to refusal to don mask
Texas III% member arrested in connection to J6 planned to use LLC to purchase weapons for militia group
Michigan militia was prepared to engage police or feds in combat, informant details
The last week has been a big one, to say the least! Here’s a weekly update covering some of the following, in very broad strokes:
The storming of the US Capitol Building
Militias and other militant far-right groups show at multiple state capitol buildings
Social media platform revolt
You’ve likely already read a lot of this, given how high up in the news it’s been this past week, so this one is going to be mainly for record-keeping.
Happy Winter Solstice and (almost) Merry Christmas! This will be the final weekly update for 2020, so Happy New Year, too. Keeping this one a bit minimal, especially as the updates remain a little light this week. Just an update on the Michigan kidnapping case and a couple of readings from around the web.
After a two-week hiatus from weekly updates focusing on some election-related work, a return for the fourth MW weekly news round-up. It’s a long one this week. Here’s the weekly(ish) update for 16 November 2020.
In the third MW weekly news round-up, a roundup of coverage of MilitiaWatch/ACLED’s election violence report, updates on last week’s stories, and some new stories from the week. These new happenings are then related to reading within the MW archives and around the web. Here’s the weekly(ish) update for 26 October 2020.
Norm Olsen, of the notorious Michigan Militia, denounced the Wolverine Watchmen militia’s plot
Olsen now lives in Alaska and started a new, non-Michigan project there years ago. However, he did tell journalists that he was sympathetic to anger against Wolverine Watchmen militia’s target, Michigan Governor Whitmer.
The American Patriot Council, an off-shoot from Michigan re-open protests taken national, looked to hold a 40-location national “Freedom March” series of rallies,
(instead, they held fewer than a dozen)
Ryan Santistevan wrote up a good brief on the organization, available here.
Our report, drawn from data from the past five months, the literature on elections violence, and analysis based on knowledge of right-wing networked violence, we identified five high-risk states and five moderate-risk states. Read the report on ACLED’s site, here. Militia groups covered in the report include the III%, covered extensively here. (Please indulge for a moment, MW rarely gets this sort of coverage)
NPR did a profile of Idaho III%er and GOP State Senate candidate, Eric Parker. Parker was kicked off of Facebook during the summer purges and was highly involved in Bundy Ranch organizing.
Michigan sheriffs/police have indicated they will refuse to enforce bans on guns at polling places this season, despite the alleged planned kidnapping of Michigan’s governor.