American Private Militia: They Want to Do More than Kidnapping Michigan’s Governor
By: Allen Huang
Tags: Politics, Military, America, Guns, Covid 19

On 8 October 2020, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation dropped a bombshell when it announced that it had detained 13 homegrown terrorists belonging to the Wolverine Watchmen, an extreme right-wing private militia. These men planned to forcibly kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer through an armed seizure of power, and at the same time violently overthrow the state government of Michigan, which is now controlled by the Democratic Party. In addition to Whitmer, Virginia’s Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, who was once notorious due to a “blackface” photo in his yearbook, was on the group’s kidnapping list as well.

Six of the men have been indicted on federal terrorism charges; the other seven have been indicted under state law in Michigan. According to the FBI’s affidavit, the plot was on their radar back in August, so they sent undercover agents to monitor every move of the extremists. In addition, according to information provided by the FBI and Andrew Birge, the federal prosecutor in western Michigan, confidential informants within the organization who worked with the police also reported the plot.

Michigan Office of the Governor

In addition to meeting in Ohio, the group had conducted military training in Michigan to “take over” the state, including how to take tactical cover and dismount and shoot. Brandon Caserta, one of the six federally indicted suspects, posted a video statement, explaining the reasoning behind Wolverine’s intent to kidnap, according to the video released in federal court on March 16. In the video, Caserta, 32, calls the Michigan government’s series of restrictions on the new crown epidemic in the U.S. “tyranny” and says he’s tired of being robbed and enslaved by the state, issuing tougher threats, “If this whole thing starts happening, I’m telling you man, I’m going to take out as many of those motherfuckers as I can, every single one of them.

As he was led away, Caserta shrugged his shoulders and looked grimly at his aunt and stepbrother, who sat in the courtroom. Assistant U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler said the two videos show the accused militiamen preparing for the violent kidnapping of the governor.

Kent County Jail

Different politicians have made different statements about the incident. Detroit U.S. Attorney Matthew Schneider argued that Michiganders who differ on each other over political differences should not be violent. But the potential victim of this conspiracy, Whitmer, a mother of two, has not been so subtle in her willingness to maintain the political balance.

Facing reporters and cameras, Whitmer, 49, wore an unconcealed weariness and anger on her face, and pointed the finger at President Trump, who has repeatedly abused and attacked her at briefings and on social media, as the seeds of this conspiracy. This horrific conspiracy caused her to abandon her belief that any pleasantries is required and cut to the chase, saying, “I know this job is hard, but honestly, I never imagined anything like this would happen.” Whitmer argued that Trump, who publicly refused to condemn white supremacy and hate groups at the presidential debates, has wildly emboldened these extremists. Such acts, she noted, hear the president’s “rallying cry” and then plot to kidnap themselves.

Not only that, but after the press conference, Whitmer penned an op-ed in the Washington Post that further pointed out Trump’s and his campaign’s misappropriation and embrace of hate: shortly after Whitmer’s speech, President Trump’s campaign advisor Jason Miller appeared on Fox News, claiming she was using it as an opportunity to promote hatred of her Republican political opponents.

In this article, Whitmer more bluntly denounced Trump and the Republican political ecology he has built, saying that when leaders encourage domestic terrorists, they legitimize their actions. On top of that, Whitmer stated that Trump, despite knowing the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic for a long time, led to the death of more than 212,000 people in the U.S. from the coronavirus through a series of failed managements and partisan political accusations; in addition, his all-caps posting with Twitter in April of “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” sparked violent protests in Lansing, Michigan’s capital city, by many white armed militias, including members of Wolverine Watchmen.

Shealah Craighead / The White House

The concept of the modern American militia movement originated before the founding of the United States in 1776, and has served to maintain community order and avoid outside attack since the colonies such as Jamestown were first established. When the guns were fired in Lexington and the War of Independence broke out, it was the signal for the American militia to go on the offensive. Today, the concept of the citizen militia is embodied in the National Guard in every state.

Today’s private militia groups are a far cry from the founding era of this concept in a practical sense. They are not controlled or led by federal or local governments, but are simply private armed groups of civilians acting together under their own approval. In addition to defending their right to bear arms, which they believe is granted to them by the Second Amendment to the Constitution, many militia groups federal and or state governments have usurped powers granted by the Constitution that rightfully belong to the people, and have used this as a justification for their intent to overthrow existing governments (especially those controlled by the Democratic Party).

In the 1992 confrontation at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, Randy Weaver, a former U.S. Army Special Forces soldier and member of the white supremacist group Aryan Nations, was surrounded by law enforcement for a weapons violation. In the ensuing gun battle, Weaver’s son and wife were killed by federal agents, and Weaver eventually surrendered. In 1993 in Waco, Texas, a similar tragedy occurred when law enforcement attempted to execute a search warrant of a Branch Davidian camp and its leader, David Koresh, for a weapons violation. It eventually culminated in a gun battle and a fire which Koresh, knowing he was about to lose, set himself on fire and burned 73 members of the Branch Davidians to death at the same time, including dozens of children. Although law enforcement is said to have committed nothing criminal in either case, many militia groups believe it was a harbinger that a civil war would break out and law enforcement would take over the constitutional rights of American citizens.

Seth Herald / Reuters

To understand the problem of domestic terrorism in the United States better, typified by Wolverine Watchmen’s kidnapping conspiracy, it is necessary to begin with April 19, 1995. It was a day that weighed heavily on many Americans: that morning, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City burst into flames with a loud bang and a fireball rose in the parking lot next to the building. A truck containing 2,177 kilograms of ammonium nitrate explosives was detonated by Timothy McVeigh, a retired veteran who later described himself as a believer in white supremacy. More than one-third of the Murrah Building was completely destroyed, ultimately killing 168 people and injuring an unaccounted for number of people.

In a subsequent confession, McVeigh showed no remorse and stated that he did so as revenge for those who died at Ruby Ridge and Waco. In June 2001, McVeigh was executed by lethal injection in a federal prison in Indiana.

This senseless slaughter was the first time that many Americans, especially white Americans and members of the law enforcement, realized that these radical and violent people were practicing and enforcing a terrorist creed not dissimilar to militant Islamic fundamentalist groups. Mark Potok, a writer for the anti-hate group Southern Poverty Law Center, recalls that homegrown terrorism after Oklahoma actually didn’t stop at all, as some of them orchestrated to nearly blow up an oil refinery in Texas soon after, but 9/11 led to all law enforcement and governmental willingness to prevent terrorism being left to foreign terrorism.

University of California, Berkeley law professor Leti Volpp discusses the 9/11 airstrikes in preventing homegrown terrorist attacks caused by radicalized militias and white supremacy in her 2003 commentary, The Citizen and The Terrorist. The stereotype of the “Arab-Muslim terrorist” creates a social divide against Muslims, Arabs, and others who look close to the predominant groups in the United States. The institutionalization of a system of discrimination based on racial profiling, designed to intimidate precisely this category of people, led directly to a heightened level of xenophobia shortly after being partially repulsed by the McVeigh bombing, allowing for a clandestine gathering of forces.

According to the SPLC, these anti-government “patriot” militias have proliferated since late 2008, when Barack Obama was first elected president, and since the rise of Trump, their behavior and agendas have become closer to the tenets of white supremacy. At the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, many prominent militias served as security forces to maintain order for Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, and “alt-right” supporters, which for many journalists and researchers meant that they showed clear signs of integration (although, there were many militiamen who participated in the march firmly rejecting the white supremacist label).

Twitter @JimKilbane

Hatred of different groups based on race and other factors is a common organizing element of these militia movements. In addition to Proud Boys, who have recently gained attention for their campaign of street violence, two other powerful militia groups, The Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, have publicly stated that they are the last line of defense against a New World Order that seeks to enslave ordinary Americans. According to their “New World Order” theories, the federal government is controlled by a secretive, globalized elite cabal that seeks to confiscate coercion, impose civil martial law, and set up concentration camps to kill dissidents. This theory has absorbed the unfounded slander of conspiracies against Jews in Europe over the centuries and has served as the tenet for their apocalyptic fables. In recent years, it has been further exploited by the extremist conspiracy theory QAnon, which supports Trump fervently, and has become a politically influential rumor.

Trump becoming the head of the federal Government was a double-edged sword for these militias. On the one hand, they suddenly lacked the prerequisites to support the “New World Order” doctrine; on the other, Trump’s attacks on “deep state” and minorities soon provided them with new targets. Some of them began to forge ties with the nation’s most important anti-Muslim organizations, and began to express increasing hostility toward loosely affiliated groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, and to focus on the threat to their ideal order posed by non-white immigrants by scouring the U.S.-Mexico border for illegal immigrants.

Disturbingly, these militias include a large number of former soldiers and law enforcement agency personnel. Two of the 13 people accused of plotting to kidnap the Michigan governor are retired Marines, including the group’s honorary leader, Joseph Morrison. An investigative media outlet found that nearly 150 current and retired police officers are members of the militia’s Facebook group; they often want police officers because they have guns, experience, and training. Running through the worldview of such militia groups, is the idea that military personnel and law enforcement officers represent the final word on the Constitution. Two other men charged in this case, Michael and William Null, were among the armed attendees at a May anti-seizure rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, organized by the state’s Barry County Sheriff’s Department.

An NBC News investigation of the suspects’ social media profiles also revealed that the Wolverine Watchmen are among the groups that believe in and promote the “Boogaloo” conspiracy theory of arming for civil war. In anti-government videos, Brandon Caserta, who refers to the government as a “tyrant,” often wears a Hawaiian shirt, one of the main symbols of Boogaloo’s identity.

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For these militias, it seems that they still maintain an originalist way of understanding the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights that took shape 229 years ago. After the COVID-19 pandemic struck the United States and the state governments imposed a lockdown, many of them took this to interpret that the government was challenging the boundaries of the Constitution. Some militia groups chose to refuse to wear masks and protest with arms; others, like the Wolverine Watchmen, chose to overthrow the government with arms, igniting an early civil war. In addition to these individuals, Kyle Rittenhouse, who gunned down two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, under the guise of “protecting local businesses,” fits a similar definition.

Seth Herald / Reuters

The tolerance of law enforcement, the agitation of gun rights groups, the shadow of racism, and conservative readings of the Constitution have all been integral to the development of the militia community to the extent that it has. According to political science professor Jack Rakove’s understanding of the Constitution, the Founding Fathers of the United States, through the Federalist Papers and otherwise, were constantly engaged in constitutional debates, and it was only because of that they diverged from Britain due to their differing understanding of the enjoyment of civil rights. In other words, it was impossible for them to think that their words had to go to be understood in an originalist way. Yet this philosophy has been redefined since the rise of Reaganite right-wing thought in the 1980s by figures such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. As a staunch conservative, Scalia believes that the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights must be known and enforced in the same way the Founding Fathers understood it when it was first written down.

Following this way of understanding, in 2008, Scalia made a ruling that was crucial to the militia movement and to the entire gun rights issue. In the majority decision in the landmark District of Columbia v. Heller case, he wrote, as the majority party, that “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.” However, in Scalia’s lengthy argument, he left no instruction manual for lower courts on how to protect this newly recognized right, thus implying that militia groups could legally train to arm themselves with the case’s ruling even if they did not comply with government regulation. In addition to Scalia, Amy Coney Barrett, a religious conservative who may soon be voting to nominally succeed Ginsburg on the Supreme Court seat but actually succeed Scalia, is also a follower of the “text, history, tradition” philosophy. She would very likely be arguing that judges need to rely on legal precedent for gun regulation, and that all challenges to the original text without legal The support of precedent is all unconstitutional.

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However, how can guns and forms of government be the same in 1791 as they are today? John E. Finn, retired professor of political science at Wesleyan University, argues in The Conversation that these militia groups, including conservative jurists who recognize their legitimacy, are deliberately misinterpreting the Constitution’s requirements for militias. Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, which deals with militias, authorizes the federal government “may call out the militia in case of civil war; its authority to suppress rebellion is found in the power to suppress insurrection and to carry on war.” But it makes no provision for private militias, and no federal or state law has ever authorized an individual armed group to call itself a militia or to perform law enforcement or military functions. Ironically, from the respective state laws of all 50 states, this form of private militia is explicitly illegal in all 50 states.

With President Trump and his right-wing media supporters openly refusing to condemn or acknowledge white supremacy and gun violence, incidents like the Michigan governor’s near-kidnapping are likely to continue to increase in the future. And as law enforcement continues to lack the zeal to enforce state statutes that explicitly disenfranchise private militia groups, their willful negligence will further amplify the misinterpretation and abuse of the U.S. Constitution by these private militias.