The Coup-Coup Birds Come Home To Roost, Con't

Why yes, white supremacist militias aren't taking the arrests from the January 6 Capitol insurrection very well at all, and they are doing things like publicly telling newspapers that they now plan to secede from the union or to "collapse the American experiment" by whatever means necessary.

The leader of a private paramilitary group that provided security for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said he has formed alliances with other far-right groups to advocate for Georgia’s secession from the union, following the arrests of participants in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

“The way patriots are now being hunted down and arrested by fellow men and women who have taken the same oath has disheartened any faith I had in the redemption or reformation of the USA as one entity,” Justin Thayer, head of the Georgia III% Martyrs, said in a text exchange with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week.

Thayer said the Martyrs have allied themselves with fellow “Three Percenter” militia the American Brotherhood of Patriots and American Patriots USA (APUSA), a north Georgia group headed by Chester Doles, a Dahlonega resident who belonged to various racist and neo-Nazi hate groups before forming the new group in 2019. The combined groups will advocate for Georgia’s secession from the union through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution or through “the collapse of the American experiment,” Thayer said.

“For the last 150 years, the Imperial Yankee culture of the northeast has been molding Georgia — and the South in general — into its ‘perfect’ image,” he said.

In an AJC interview this week, Doles confirmed the groups were working together, but he would not say what they intended to do.

“Things are different now. Everything has changed,” he said. “We’ve seen our last Republican president in American history. The ballot box — we tried as hard as we could try. It’s not working.”

Folks, they're not longer pretending niceties here. We have a full-blown domestic terrorism movement on our hands and we have had them for years. They want out of America, and they are absolutely going to resort to deadly violence to achieve it. Now, they are banding together.

Researchers who study the far right say political unrest over the past year gave extremist groups opportunities to collaborate across ideological divides, forging alliances based on common grievances and enemies. The November presidential election and the proliferation of baseless conspiracy theories about its outcome only pushed groups closer together.

“We saw members of traditional militias, white supremacists, QAnon and other people in the same spaces and claiming very similar enemies,” said Amy Iandiorio, an investigative researcher with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

This “shared victimhood narrative” around the outcome of the presidential election created the opportunity for “tactical” alliances among groups that normally wouldn’t mix, she said.

The Martyrs raised eyebrows this fall when they appeared as private security for then-candidate Greene at a rally in Ringgold with former GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler. Greene posed for multiple photos with the militia and said she needed them to protect herself from unspecified death threats she said she had received.

On Jan. 6, Thayer joined throngs of pro-Trump supporters who rallied to hear the former president’s baseless claims of a “stolen” election and condemnation of “weak Republicans,” but he said he did not take part in storming the U.S. Capitol immediately after it.

Doles has been working longer to build support for his political group, staging occasional public rallies and motorcycle convoys from his north Georgia base. He claims to have walked away from his career as a white supremacist activist with groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the National Alliance, while also maintaining ties to some figures in those movements. His attempts to insinuate America Patriots USA into mainstream conservative politics have met with limited success, however.

Doles championed Greene’s candidacy on his website and on social media, often posting a photo of Greene posing with APUSA members taken during her Republican primary campaign.

No, I don't actually expect a war. I do however expect more terrorist attacks in the weeks and months ahead.

We all need to face that reality.