Read on Twitter
So this is the moment I've been waiting for since I covered Donald Trump's 2016 meeting with William S. Lind who was one of the 1st far right strategists to advocate putting citizens militias under county sheriffs. Now, thousands of armed militants plan to converge in Richmond...
2) ...next Monday. So this AM I poked around a bit, and now I'm listening to Stewart Rhodes, leader of the "Oath Keepers" saying that his people are going to Virginia to make the sheriff militia posse thing happen. There are precedents for this - Maricopa County sheriff Arpaio..
3)..had his own personal army (posse) of several thousand. Some of them were convicted criminals. & down in Texas, County Sheriff Pamela Elliott has been accused of using her militia-linked "posse" to harass her political enemies. https://www.texasobserver.org/above-the-law-pamela-elliott-sheriff/
4)..but this is a wholly different level. Rhodes is literally saying that the intent is top created county-level citizens militias, under county sheriffs, that can nullify state laws and state exercise of authority that they disagree with. This amounts to an armed insurrection vs
5)..state level and federal authority. And it is on an unprecedented scale. Richard Mack's CSPOA is key to this - a national network of county sheriffs willing to go against state and federal authority. CSPOA has VA county sheriffs who are members and what's more, individual...
6)..VA counties (such Tazewell County) *have voted to fund* their own citizen militia. Culpeper County's Sheriff Scott Jenkins has vowed to deputize "thousands" of armed citizens if state government passes gun restrictions. Dozens of VA counties have declared themselves to be..
7) "Second Amendment Sanctuaries". That's a national movement, by the way, promoted by the CSPOA & by the Oath Keepers (which works closely with CSPOA). My point is that this isn't just about an inchoate mass of angry gun owners descending on Richmond. In the background there's..
8)..sustained organizing by CSPOA and other groups. The vision is to create citizens militias, under county sheriffs, in as many counties across the US as possible. Such a development would be quite hard for state & federal authorities to counter, because an open shooting war...
9) would merely swell the citizen militia ranks tenfold. And consider a confrontation between state/federal troops or police and these militias (or "posses"); if shooting breaks out, the state/federal authorities lose. And if they back down, *they also lose*.
10) Now, there very much is a strategic vision behind all of this. First, there's William S. Lind's vision, which I referenced in my long 2016 piece on Trump meeting Lind ( https://4thgenwar.wordpress.com/2016/07/03/trump-meets-man-who-inspired-2011-terror-attack-deadlier-than-orlando-shooting/) but then consider Richard Mack. Before he ran for county sheriff, Mack had been...
11)..the top lobbyist for Gun Owners of America, headed by Larry Pratt. Now, Pratt - billed by Rolling Stone as "The Gun Owner's Secret Weapon" ( https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-zealot-larry-pratt-is-the-gun-lobbys-secret-weapon-87059/) has praised the activities of civilian militias under Guatemalan president Efrain Rios Montt, whose...
12) scorched earth counterinsurgency campaign in Guatemala in the early 1980s was ruled to be genocidal. But Pratt also has close ties to the theocratic Christian Reconstructionism movement (some experts consider him part of CR. Back in the early 80s he contributed a chapter...
13)..on militias to a key CR strategy book. And as sociologist James Scaminaci has documented, the American militia movement has long been part of the Christian Reconstructionist strategy, its long game for eventual theocracy. OK, back to Mack - his CSPOA VP of Operations is...
14) a guy named Sam Bushman, who runs a tiny but national radio network, "Liberty News Radio" which carries a show called "The Political Cesspool", which is the premier white supremacist radio show in America, bar none. But also, LNR happens to carry the radio show...
15) of Washington state legislator Matt Shea, who was just exposed for his involvement in domestic terrorism pursuant to his plan for creating a 51st, "biblical" state in Eastern Washington state. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/20/matt-shea-domestic-terrorism-washington-state-report Shea had previously become notorious for his circulation...
16)...of a document titled "Biblical Basis for War" that advocated violence towards creating a theocracy and advised killing all non-compliant males. As it happens, Shea has just appeared (12/30/2019) on the radio show of CSPOA's VP, Sam Bushman ( https://www.libertyroundtable.com/2019/12/30/radio-show-hour-2-12-30-2019/).
17) It wasn't the first time the show, Liberty Roundtable, has featured Matt Shea. Now back in 2016 when I was writing on Trump & Lind, I noticed something quite extraordinary going on with the LR show - suddenly, top members & surrogates of the Trump for President effort...
18) started appearing on the show, day after day, including appearances from Trump's 2 sons. Now, these were individuals who could have been on Fox almost at will. So what were they doing on a tiny radio network with one big station and 5-6 stations the size of gnats? Two answers
19) 1st, the entrance point for the whole thing was when the Trump campaign reached out to get 1 of the Trump boys on "The Political Cesspool" which, remember Bushman's radio network hosts. Now, a quick digression - the "Cesspool" is hosted by James Edwards who is on the board...
20) of the Council of Conservative Citizens, whose racist website propaganda *directly* inspired Dylann Roof (per Roof's manifesto) to carry out his racist massacre on June 17, 2015. The Trump campaign gave James Edwards VIP press access to a Memphis, TN Trump rally, then...
21)..a month later approached him concerning a Trump son appearance on his show. Edwards couldn't do it on the proffered weekday slot because he does his show on the weekends. So he asked his good friend Sam Bushman (the 2 co-host each other's shows frequently) who was thrilled..
22)..so Donald Trump, Jr. appeared, with Edwards co-hosting, on Bushman's show in March 2016. I wrote that up here: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-jr-courted-w_b_9948666. But it didn't stop there -Edwards & Bushman got VIP press access to the 2016 Republican National Convention ( https://www.huffpost.com/entry/from-inside-rnc-white-nat_b_11090910)
23) Then, starting in September, 2016, Trump people began flooding onto Sam Bushman's Liberty Roundtable radio show. I documented that here https://4thgenwar.wordpress.com/2016/10/26/a-short-history-of-public-trump-campaign-ties-to-the-cspoa/ & about a year later a Rolling Stone story noted some of the many ties between Trump people and the CSPOA, which...
24) CSPOA co-founder Richard Mack has billed as "The Army to Set Our Nation Free" (see: https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/the-army-to-set-our-nation-free/ & Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trumps-favorite-sheriffs-part-of-a-growing-anti-government-extremist-movement-205420/
25) All of which is to suggest that *we cannot assume* there is no coordination between the Trump Administration & the conjoined CSPOA & Oath Keepers. Communication could be opened as easily as a text from Bushman to Donald Trump, Jr. And riling up the hard right would certainly
26)..help turn out Trump's base in 2020. But it would also establish a framework for the implementation of fascism, American style - because if armed Trump supporters *with badges* hit the streets, well... you think things are bad now?
27) UPDATE 1: in the background of all this looms the Christian Reconstructionism movement. I discuss Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes' affiliation with CR here, in this thread: https://twitter.com/brucewilson/status/1218677753047928836
I'm going to tack on some of the many related threads I've written over the past several years. Such as "What's the end game?" https://twitter.com/brucewilson/status/1151807323691782144
