The Face of American Insurgency

[marmar]

The Face of American Insurgency
The Michigan plot wasn’t about Donald Trump. It goes deeper than that.

By FRED KAPLAN


(Slate) The most striking thing about the six domestic terrorists arrested on Thursday for conspiring to kidnap the governor of Michigan isn’t that they actually took steps to carry out their plot—though that is unusual and frightening (most groups of this ilk talk big but do little). More, it’s what the gang reveals about the steep rise in American militia activity this year.

Some of these groups—including this one, which, had it succeeded, would have been the season’s most brazenly violent—seem to be inspired not by white supremacist ideology or left/right partisanship, but rather by an off-the-cliff radical variant of a feeling deeply rooted in American culture: fear and hatred of government.

The 15-page FBI affidavit against the terrorists—who called their group the Wolverine Watchmen—contains verbatim excerpts of conversations, which were recorded by two informants and two FBI infiltrators. (The two informants—neither of whom knew that the other was an informant—were members of the group who got spooked by talk of committing violence, went to law enforcement, and agreed to wear wires while attending meetings.) At least in the passages cited in the affidavit, there are no racist remarks or references to President Donald Trump’s rhetoric. More typical is this soliloquy on July 24 by Adam Fox, clearly the group’s leader:

In all honesty, right now … I just wanna make the world glow, dude. I’m not even fuckin’ kidding. I just wanna make it all glow, dude. I don’t fuckin’ care anymore. I’m just so sick of it. That’s what it’s gonna take for us to take it back. … Everything’s gonna have to be annihilated, man. We’re gonna topple it all, dude. It’s what great frickin’ conquerors, man, we’re just gonna conquer every fuckin’ thing, man.

....(snip)....

The wannabe terrorists in Michigan weren’t very bright, judging from the affidavit, but this shouldn’t be too reassuring. “Most terrorists are idiots,” Kilcullen said. “That doesn’t mean they can’t commit some very deadly acts.” The number of truly violent groups is also quite small, but that doesn’t mean much either. “The sequence goes like this,” he said. “Mass protests, for instance against lockdown laws, inspire small groups that want to commit violence. Some in those groups drop out. But a small core group sticks around, goes underground, and becomes more dangerous. It only takes a few people to inflict a lot of damage.” ..........(more)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/10/michigan-plot-wolverine-watchmen-whitmer.html

[SWBTATTReg]

1. Lazy a&& thugs, want to bring change about, because they are lazy and don't have anything,

and think that the way to success is to hurt and main other Americans because they don't want to work any to get ahead like most of us do. Dumb a&&es. I hope that the authorities throw the book at them, they deserve it since they were so willing, so eager it seems, to hurt the rest of us in the process...