Far-right militias are returning | WIRED
Leah Feiger: To be fair, the 2,500-strong militia across the United States is carefully organized on Telegram and encourages the use of armed weapons in response to anything from natural disasters to proclamations. falsehoods about election fraud, are still truly disturbing. IM worry.
David Gilbert: Absolutely, and I think that’s been lost. When you write articles like this, a lot of people say, “Oh, you shouldn’t support these people. They’re making this up. They’re cheating.”
Leah Feiger: Sure.
David Gilbert: But there are people in these Telegram groups who want to join armed militias, and that’s part of a broader resurgence in far-right paramilitary activities and discussions that I and the experts are seeing online in recent weeks and months, and it’s truly worrying.
Leah Feiger: We’re going to take a break and when we come back we’ll talk about how all these types of militias are starting to come back into the mainstream and what this means for 2024. Hi Welcome back to the WIRED Politics Lab. David, you’re talking about how militias are having a resurgence right now. What exactly do you mean by that?
David Gilbert: I mean Lang, and his militia network that they launched is just part of a broader movement that both I and other journalists and researchers monitoring the space have seen in the past weeks. recently, and it’s all related to the 2024 election, that people need to be ready to respond if something happens and of course, that will happen if Donald Trump loses.
Leah Feiger: So what does Lang say will happen in case Donald Trump loses?
David Gilbert: Well, Lang talks about civil unrest, and if Trump loses, people will automatically be outraged. Do you believe that the results of Joe Biden winning the election are accurate?
Jake Lang: No, I think it’s almost a statistical outlier or unlikely.
David Gilbert: When I spoke to him, he gave a list of the most widely known election conspiracies from 2020.
Jake Lang: Cheating, stealing, manipulation, fraud, whatever you want to call it. That is not the will of the people.
David Gilbert: Looking ahead to 2024, he predicts that if Trump loses, there will be a major disaster and a lot of angry people, and that’s when his militia will be ready to step in.
Leah Feiger: This is real? I mean, people say a lot of things online. What connections are you and other researchers drawing between this moment in 2020?
David Gilbert: The network of people organizing this activity is much larger and stronger because they’ve had four years to create these nationwide networks of connections and groups, whether it’s online or in person. We saw before 2020 that there were some researchers and some journalists who were flying the flag, not many, but they were flying the flag and saying, “This is worrying.” Intelligence agencies also noticed this was happening but no one took any action. I think this time, we’re about five months away from the election, I think the signals are much stronger. In recent weeks, I’ve certainly noticed a significant increase in the number of people who are discussing things like militias, things like sheriff’s forces, that people need to be ready for 2024, the idea This idea holds that something will happen on November 5 if the outcome is unsuccessful. doesn’t go the way everyone thinks it will go. So I think that’s the similarity that you see in the middle of 2020 is that people were ignoring what was in front of them. In 2020, you can understand why that happened because something like January 6 has never happened before. So what’s happening this time is much bigger, but at least people at the moment don’t seem to be paying attention.
