MilitiaWatchThe Oath Keepers are a far-right national militia organization formed in 2009 in reaction to Barack Obama’s 2008 electoral victory. The group arose from the broader far-right reaction to the United States’ first Black president that also drove the rise of the Tea Party and a resurgence of the contemporary militia movement. The group’s members are also well-steeped in the prepper community and many members thereby also hold extremely conspiratorial worldviews. Since 2009, the group has been highly active in paramilitary operations, bomb threats, and more.
Below, you will find all MilitiaWatch articles mentioning the movement.
This week, several key developments get covered in the weekly update:
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:
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.
A day late here (sorry), but here’s a quick weekly update on the militia world for the week proceeding our current. It includes a conviction for a 2017 militia’s bombing of a mosque, threats against GOP officials in Georgia, a fight in a parking garage in Atlanta, and a few articles to peruse on the Oath Keepers.
In the second MW weekly news round-up, some updates on last week’s stories and some updates on some much older stories, too. These new happenings are then related to reading within the MW archives and around the web. Here’s the weekly(ish) update for 19 October 2020.
This piece is intended as a piece to go alongside Micah Loewinger’s co-created On the Media/MilitiaWatch radio piece covering Zello. In the radio piece, you will hear in their own voices some of the militia groups referenced in this visual article intended to accompany and expand upon that piece. You will also hear some discussion about the app’s leadership and PR response to our investigation.
Next, it is important to note that this visual accompaniment is intended only as a first look into these networks on Zello. More data work is being completed to follow this article and the audio piece it accompanies.
Micah Loewinger has experience with Zello and militia organizing directly, as he reported from a ‘command station’ for Virginia’s 20 January anti-gun regulation rally. This station, as Micah reports in the piece here, was manned by AJ Andrews of the National Patriots Coalition III% (NPC III%), a country-wide movement.
In Summer 2019, around an environmental bill at the Oregon State House, threats of militia involvement at the State House forced a closure of the session and numerous news articles to boot. So how did this all happen?