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Updates

Monthly: May 24


Greetings, MW reader, and happy Pride! Here’s a very light monthly roundup for May 2024, featuring a couple of key stories related to the following:

  • Bundy’s followers running for office in Oregon, setting up amateur radio stations
  • An arrest and a guilty plea for a Patriot Movement supporter and militia member, respectively
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Updates

Monthly: Oct 23


Greetings, MilitiaWatch readers! Hopefully, you had a good spooky season! (Many of those covered in this Monthly update did not.) In broad strokes, this monthly covers:

  • Legal updates for escapees, would-be Thanksgiving attackers, and Nazis
  • Updates related to governance and policing, and overlaps with militia (again)
  • Armed activism a la “2A Rallies” and otherwise at Capitols etc

The previous MW Monthly (covering September 2023) can be read here:


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Updates

Weekly: 26 Apr 21


Another brief weekly update, spanning some of the following:

  • A militia training site refuses to shut down
  • Zello Tapes now available to the public
  • More Proud Boys arrested for their role in J6

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Zello, Operator II: Severed networks and those that remain


This article follows up a previous MilitiaWatch article on the use of Zello, a free walkie-talkie app, by the US-based armed far-right, including aggressive activists working in support of former president Donald Trump. That article with visualizations is available here:

Since that article, further investigation of right-wing militant groups’ use of Zello resulted in the direct recording of it being used at the 6 January storming of the US Capitol Building. This was then published in The Guardian. As references in that article, a list of over 800 channels was sent to Zello with a request for comment. Zello subsequently announced that they had banned 2000 militia-related channels, though they described groups’ use of the platform as “social media vanity messaging”. An On the media podcast covering this can be listened to at this link.

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Updates

Weekly Update: 19 Oct 2020


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.


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Zello, Operator: Recruitment, right-wing ecosystems, and semi-clandestine organization


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.