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They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology



They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology PDF

Author: Malcolm Nance

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Genres:

Publish Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN-10: 1250279003

Pages: 320

File Type: Epub

Language: English

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Book Preface

When I sat down on the set of the HBO TV show Real Time with Bill Maher just three days after the 2020 election, I knew what I was going to say would be exceedingly unpopular. The counting of the votes to determine who had won the election took almost three days. By the time the show was taped in Los Angeles, all that remained to do was declare then former vice president Joe Biden the president-elect of the United States. A feeling of relief was in the air. For the first time in a year, I felt it too.

On the masked, high-precaution flight from New York to LAX, one could feel the lighter attitude. Gone were the sullen feelings and dark shadow over the country. The Trump voters were still standing by for him to be declared the winner, but it was apparent to everyone else in America that the spell of hatred was breaking. The numbers were against him. Trump was losing badly. The last states to be called, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, were all falling solidly in the Biden camp. The closest vote counts were in Georgia and Arizona, but by Friday evening Biden was ahead with small but insurmountable leads in both. He already had enough votes to win the presidency, but few in the mainstream media were ready to make that call publicly. Bill Maher relished in calling it and so he did, with his usual boldness and swagger. Twelve hours later, the rest of the national media would join him.

So, there I sat. Ready to spoil the party, trip up the parade, and pop the bubble of Kumbaya that was forming over America. I was doing my usual job of marring an otherwise happy occasion by warning that a grave threat was looming. And journalists, commentators, analysts, and pundits of all stripes started to anticipate the prospect of being able to sleep in without Trump’s tweets waking them in the middle of the night. The joy of the election’s results would form a crust of tears when the risk outgrew the adrenaline rush of happiness.

Not me. “I’m going to give you doom and gloom,” I said to Maher. “We are going to have a political paramilitary insurgency in which Donald Trump will be Saddam Hussein; we already have his sons, Uday and Qusay.” Maher was a bit incredulous but asked the right question and caught on quickly. He said, “Paramilitary—in other words, not the military like in these countries; they don’t want to use the official military, so they have their Boogaloo Bois.”

I agreed that “paramilitary” meant “the Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, and all the rest of the Vanilla ISIS crew.” We then discussed what would happen when Trump’s supporters rejected the election results and started active armed resistance.

I went on that show with an agenda. I wanted to associate the events that were to come with the word “insurgency,” and I wanted to do so as soon as possible and from a highly visible platform.

I had been tracking a disturbing trend all throughout 2019 that had reached a crescendo by the 2020 election, and so I could not enjoy the momentary silence. A new movement was slowly emerging from the embers of the American right-wing extremists known as the alternative right, or alt-right. They were angry. They were armed. And they would reject the Biden victory vocally and violently. They were primed to become insurgents in a low-grade civil resistance.

As predicted, they started with an act of blatant insurrection. Based on Trump’s seditious words, his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, with the intent to stop the certification of the election by force. Most came to storm the building and to stop the vote. Others may have come to hunt and possibly kill Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Only a miracle and the bravery of the Capitol Hill and Washington, D.C., police officers prevented there being more than the five deaths that resulted that day.

In my role as a counterterrorism expert on MSNBC News, I have a track record of offering well-grounded warnings based on intelligence analyses that have proved uncanny in their accuracy. There is a reason for that. As an intelligence professional, I don’t guess. My work is years ahead of most media investigations because I collect hard data and analyze events through the lens of my thirty-plus years of intelligence community experience. My career in monitoring, tracking, and destroying foreign threats to America gives me the ability to call out risks and incoming challenges that might not reveal themselves easily to others. That body of knowledge and a natural alacrity at detecting the right pattern means I identify risks faster, more accurately, and with greater depth than the average journalist or amateur web sleuth.

In July 2016, I was the first person in U.S. news media to warn that the United States was under attack through a massive political warfare operation using foreign disinformation created by a hostile agency, the Russian Directorate of Military Intelligence, the GRU. This operation corrupted the mindset of more than a third of Americans. It was successful in generating so many false narratives that most journalists looked in the wrong direction not just for the origins of the attack but to determine Russia’s objectives.

In my first Trump-Russia scandal book, The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and Wikileaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election, I accurately predicted the strategy, tactics, players, and foreign intelligence operations that worked to put Donald Trump into the presidency. And I did it six weeks before the 2016 election. Two years later, the Mueller report, a House Intelligence Committee report, a joint intelligence community report, and a Senate Intelligence Committee report all validated every assertion I made.

They Want to Kill Americans also has disturbing links to my 2018 book The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West, in which I present cooperative links between Russian-backed European far-right extremists and the new American alt-right. The alt-right is a hodgepodge of American hatred—an unglued assemblage of racist and anti-Semitic neo-Nazis, fascism-loving white supremacists, white evangelical dominionists, and dead-ender Southern neo-Confederates. The alt-right had its international coming out in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11 and 12, 2017, at the Unite the Right rally. Their aim: to show the world America had a serious fascist army that would bring this country into the fight to defend the white race.

The right-wing extremists first held a torch-lit night march reminiscent of the Nazis’ Nuremberg rallies. The next day, they tore into the lines of liberal protesters and a melee ensued. One alt-right militant drove his car into a crowd of protesters and killed a young woman named Heather Heyer. The youth wing of the conservative movement had made its mark. By evening, all of America and, by extension, the world knew who the alt-right were.

At the time, they were all unabashed supporters of President Trump, but the love was not publicly or openly reciprocated until the day of Heather Heyer’s death. President Trump knew who they were; they were Trump voters. Instead of condemning their actions, he called them “very fine people.” The savageness of the national rejection stunned Trump, but it also stunned the alt-right. Seemingly overnight, even the limited public support for their activities disappeared.

However, the violence did not. Over the next two years, flashes of their pro-Trump extremism would emerge: a series of attacks on synagogues in Pennsylvania and California that killed Jews; an anti-immigrant mass shooting in Texas that massacred Mexican Americans; the mailing of sixteen pipe bombs to the Democratic party leadership in an attempted assassination by Cesar Sayoc, an unabashed Trump supporter, who built the bombs in a van festooned with Trump images and dozens of bumper stickers spewing hatred of liberals and Democrats and who was subsequently arrested by the FBI. All of these terrorist attacks revealed a trend. The perpetrators were almost exclusively supporters of President Trump and his most hateful policies.

These incidents also revealed that the alt-right had not actually disbanded after being called out in Charlottesville. In the run-up to the 2020 election, they assimilated so deeply into the pro-Trump Make America Great Again masses that they just seemed to disappear from the political stage. In fact, they went underground … in the open. They adopted the red MAGA hat as a form of camouflage and became indistinguishable from the average angry Trump voter. In the chrysalis of Trump rallies, few recognized their transformation into a giant multiarmed hate monster. Like the fictional radiation-eating Mothra, they fed and grew more powerful on their enemies’ detestation. During the summer of 2020, they finally revealed themselves as a much larger armed militant force determined to use the Second Amendment as both a shield and a potential cudgel to bully the nation.

Hundreds of armed gunmen showed up at the steps of the Michigan State House to demand that the governor, Gretchen Whitmer, stop shutting down businesses and mandating wearing a mask in the middle of a global pandemic. The Proud Boys, a militant all-white street-fighting gang, attacked Black Lives Matter protesters in numerous cities. The Boogaloo Bois, a group of young white “accelerationists,” rallied to hasten the fall of the current government through armed struggle to bring about an all-white ethnostate. Traditional state militiamen were recruiting and were now showing up on the streets of America to visibly confront minorities who opposed Trump’s policies. Their guns were almost everywhere you looked.

A new factor emerged as well. An internet cult. A fringe of a fringe inspired by secret messages from a mysterious supposed military intelligence official who called himself Q. Q preached a gospel that Donald Trump was a global hero secretly dismantling a cabal of Satan-worshipping liberals and Hollywood elites who kidnapped and murdered children. The rantings of the devout Q-Anon believers predicted a Trump-led “storm,” during which tens of thousands of liberals would be arrested or killed.

By the end of the summer, it was clear to intelligence professionals that these groups, the most vociferous of Trump’s adherents, were being honed into a dagger designed to slit the throat of democracy. They were planning for war.

They Want to Kill Americans is an evidence-based assessment of events and activities that uncover the insurgency that started well before the insurrectionists’ attack on the U.S. Capitol. While many regarded Donald Trump’s antics as just narcissistic insanity, a few of us recognized that there was a serious threat—that there was an un-American malevolence rising within the seventy-four million people who voted to keep him in power.

They have already started to transform themselves into a malicious political-opposition machine that intends to destroy the Biden administration and liberalism in America on every level. The Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung optimized modern insurgency, giving it three phases. The first phase is the most important, when insurgents try to gain legitimacy by tearing down a solidly elected government through extreme political positions, propaganda, armed resistance, and terrorism.

With the election of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, I made the relatively easy prognostication that the Trump movement would evolve into four wings: Trump and his family, the Republican Party and their mainstream voters, armed militias and terrorists, and the Q-Anon conspiracy cult. Over time, as they continue to reject the 2020 election, they will merge into an active American insurgency. They will attempt to bring good governance into chaos and set the stage for the collapse of the Democratic Party coalition that defeated Trump. The armed contingents could well join into an alliance of physical-resistance forces to threaten and agitate for the largest armed rebellion since the Civil War. Then they will attempt to return to power.

Just as Sinn Féin was composed of a political party and a terrorist group, so too with the American insurgency the Republicans could become its political wing. Its leaders could cue a completely deniable militant wing to sow chaos, conduct terrorism, and carry out armed actions with and without direct orders.

I call this gathering movement the Trump Insurgency in the United States (TITUS).

The people who support TITUS look like your neighbors, because right-wing violent-extremist terrorists, insurrectionists, and insurgents are your neighbors. And they want America to take a hard right turn away from democracy toward authoritarianism—by force if that’s what it takes.

They Want to Kill Americans shows how the last five years have, to varying degrees, transformed as many as seventy-four million Americans into advocates for dictatorship and enemies of democracy. The steps of the radicalization that created TITUS—and the symptoms of that radicalization—are visible. You may no longer be able to have Thanksgiving dinner with members of your family who advocate violence; you may be horrified by their open discussion of hatred and mass murder. And the conditions that created susceptibility to radicalization have not been changed by the pandemic, but have, in fact, been made worse.

The urge to return to a place of “normalcy”—to forget about Trump and his followers—though emotionally understandable, is the worst possible response we can have to potential future dangers. Trump’s losing the election did not remove him from our lives or remove him as an animating figure in the Republican Party. He is not going anywhere. Trump will likely continue to stoke the fires of hatred to an unimaginable level; he has never behaved within the norms of previous former presidents. The actions of Trump that led to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and his impeachment trial provide more than enough evidence that he will continue spinning a dangerous mythology of himself as folk hero and conquering knight.

American militiamen, terrorists, and radicalized political activists are already armed in numbers that must be taken seriously. The strategy, tactics, and evolving beliefs that drive the raw street-level acts have been regularly missed in the media, principally because Trump’s most loyal and violent foot soldiers benefit from white privilege.

They Want to Kill Americans is the first highly detailed look into the heart of the potential low-grade insurgency that will either lose steam or explode and set the stage for a social-media-driven internal rebellion. I reveal who the insurgents are and the roots and current manifestations of this threat, providing a way for readers to understand the past, present, and future of radical, domestic right-wing violent extremism in America. I offer strategies that empower individuals, civic groups, and local, state, and federal government to counteract and prevent the agitation that threatens our democratic system of governance.

They Want to Kill Americans is an early warning to the nation. America may once again come under a wave of terrorist attacks. But unlike our foreign enemies, the chaos agents and subversives who attacked our democracy from overseas in the global war on terrorism, the enemy that threatens our democracy now is within our borders. They are American. And they are radicalizing, arming, and planning to kill Americans to install a dictatorship. They must be stopped, hopefully before blood flows in earnest.


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