I just finished scrubbing through a brutal 75 minute interview that Ivan Raiklin, shot with Cliven Bundy in June of 2024. Brutal because even at 2x speed it’s almost unbearable to listen to the ramblings of the 79 year old anti-government alt-right icon Bundy interspersed with insane conspiracy soundbites from the psychopath Raiklin. It’s interesting to watch these extremists speak prior to trump being elected a second time. I doubt that even Raiklin in his wildest dreams could have imagined how successful and total the coup in Nov of 2024 would be.
I’m surprised I didn’t drown in the irony of it all. The conversation focuses on the dangers of tyranny from the federal government, and the dangers of federal agents being turned loose on US civilians. These same people who not even 12 months prior warned Americans of the dangers of the tyrannical federal government and federal troops murdering US citizens are now cheering on that very same federal overreach, but it’s all okay because their cult leader is in charge.
In this interview Raiklin is clearly intent on one objective - retribution, and tries to bring the conversation back to the topic of retribution at every turn. Bundy, being a 79 year old man, fails to stay on topic and meanders along. Throughout the interview Raiklin badgers Cliven on what he thinks should be done to the men who prosecuted him and asks again and again for names of individuals responsible for the Bundy’s “persecution.” For his part Cliven is not interested and it clearly frustrates Raiklin, who is forced to sit and listen to his ramblings.
Raiklin thinks like a SF soldier. He understand how coups and regime changes work. He understands that in order for his extremist coup to win he will need to remove all of his opponents through violence. Where politicians think about voters and donations, Raiklin thinks about target lists. He thinks about the leaders that need to be removed. He’s careful not to outright say it, but it’s crystal clear what his intentions are. Murder. He is talking about murdering everyone on his list. He’s openly called for the execution of those named on his “retribution tour” list.
CNN cut together a great short three minute video that succinctly describes exactly who this psychopath is. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/10/politics/video/maga-far-right-extremist-ivan-raiklin-digvid
The following is from The Atlantic. The bold emphasis are added by me.
“There must be consequences,” Raiklin said, for the “unlawful, immoral, unethical, illegal” vaccination program, which he also asserted, with no evidence, “ended up killing lots of people.” In fact, tens of thousands of service members did refuse the vaccine, and about 8,000 were discharged for failing to comply with the policy. But Raiklin speculated that as many as 1 million more still in uniform might “want to participate in retribution” against Pentagon leadership. (Depending on where in the world they serve, military personnel are required to receive about a dozen other vaccinations, including for polio, influenza, and typhoid.)
Retribution is Raiklin’s watchword these days. He calls himself Trump’s “secretary of retribution,” settling scores from the first term and ready to do the same in a potential second. His battles aren’t only with military leaders. After Trump lost the presidency in 2020, Raiklin suggested that Vice President Mike Pence could reject electors from the states that Joe Biden had won, on the grounds that they might be fraudulent. Those ideas were later taken up by John Eastman, a lawyer who has been indicted in Arizona for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results there. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Raiklin may be one of the intellectual founders of Trump’s election denialism.
More recently, Raiklin, who left the Army Reserve in 2022 at the rank of lieutenant colonel, according to an Army spokesperson, has promoted the potentially illegal idea that state legislatures could withhold their electors in the event that Trump loses. He has shown up in swing states, including North Carolina, where he pushed for lawmakers to award the electors to Trump ahead of time, on the theory that Hurricane Helene had disrupted the casting of ballots in the state.
Raiklin’s ideas for ensuring a Trump victory dovetail with the plans he has hinted at for exacting retributive justice on government officials. In his conversation with Bundy, Raiklin said that he would like to “coordinate” with those members of the armed forces supposedly still aggrieved over mandatory vaccinations, “to channel those skills, training, passion, in a positive way, to kind of autocorrect the lawlessness and to create consequences for those who created that lawlessness.”
He has suggested that military personnel could be “deputized by sheriffs,” as he told Bundy in their conversation. This idea is rooted in the fringe theory that local sheriffs possess law-enforcement authority superseding that of any elected official or officer, at any level of government. Proponents of the so-called constitutional sheriffs’ movement urged sheriffs to investigate disproven claims of election fraud in 2020 and to get involved this year in election administration.
Bundy seemed a bit daunted by the scale of resistance that Raiklin described to him. The federal bureaucracy is “so broad,” he said, that it’s practically immovable. Raiklin reassured him: “That’s where people like me come into play, that know the system very well and in detail, to create priorities. You start with the top, and you work your way through the system.”
To guide that work, Raiklin has created a “deep-state target list,” with the names of more than 300 current and former government officials, members of Congress, journalists, and others who he thinks deserve some of that “lawful justice.” The names of some of their family members are also included.
The list, which is helpfully color-coded, reads like a greatest hits of all the supposedly corrupt plotters who Trump and his supporters allege have targeted them. Among others, it includes FBI officials who worked on the investigation into potential links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia; lawmakers and congressional staff who managed both Trump impeachments; members of the Capitol Police who defended Congress from pro-Trump rioters on January 6, 2021; witnesses who later testified to Congress about the attack; and the senior public-health officials who led the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. As if to demonstrate that even the closest of Trump’s allies can still be in league with the forces of government treachery, the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who helped speed development of the COVID vaccine as a member of Operation Warp Speed, also made Raiklin’s list.
Several former intelligence officials Raiklin has singled out told me they are well acquainted with his threats. They presume that if Trump is reelected, the Justice Department, the IRS, and other federal agencies will conduct capricious audits and frivolous investigations, all designed, if not to put them in prison, then to spend large sums of money on legal fees. A few told me they worried that Raiklin would publish their addresses or details about their families. They were less concerned about him showing up at their home than about some unhinged deep-state hunter he might inspire. In interviews with right-wing podcasters, Raiklin has said he would conduct “livestreamed swatting raids” against his targets. Swatting is the illegal practice of falsely reporting an emergency in order to summon armed law enforcement to someone’s home.
A Trump-campaign official told me that Raiklin has “no role or affiliation with the campaign.” Raiklin seems to like to suggest a relationship by promoting his physical proximity to Trump. In a post on X, he shared a photo of himself standing feet from Trump while he spoke from the lectern at an unidentified rally. Also standing nearby was Kash Patel, a fierce Trump loyalist said to be on a shortlist for a senior national-security position in a second Trump administration, possibly director of the CIA.
https://archive.is/wldMm#selection-873.0-873.507
It’s very interesting to read these pieces written in 2024 now that the election has passed and trump has taken power. Their warnings have proven quite prophetic. Kash Patel was put in-charge of the FBI. The same organization that Raiklin calls the “F.B. Lie.”
It’s easy to write off Raiklin as just another conspiracy nutjob, but you shouldn’t. Spend a few minutes browsing his twitter account and it’s clear that he is well connected and influential within this administration. Remember - there are no adults left in this regime. It is a circle jerk of conspiracy theorists, ass-kissers, billionaires, and more extremists than you’d find Jonestown, Guyana(before the cyanide laced kool-aid was served). So of course this psychopath would weasel his way into the inner circles of power.
Also take a look at the S on the “Deep State Marauder” shirt. That’s a SS lightning bolt, clearly a dog-whistle for white supremacists. So of course it’s no surprise that Raiklin gave a press conference with pardoned J6 insurrectionists and proudly stood with Oathkeeper founder Stewart Rhodes(sentenced to 18 years for seditious conspiracy) and chairman of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio(sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy). Aside - Rhodes shot himself in the face with his own gun and put out his eye, that’s why he’s wearing an eye-patch.
Constitutional Sheriffs, Again
All my research keeps leading me back to the constitutional sheriffs. In Raiklin’s interview with Bundy they discuss using sheriffs to arrest and disarm federal agents and federal troops. It’s clear these extremists have honed in on the broad and sweeping powers held by sheriffs as I have. If they are abused these powers can be taken very very far and all will be legal in so far as they follow the letter if not the intent of the laws on the books.
Raiklin has also courted so-called constitutional sheriffs for his retribution cause. In April 2024, he attended the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) Convention in Las Vegas. During a press conference, he asked the speakers, including former Sheriff Richard Mack and Michigan Sheriff Dar Leaf, what was the “maximum level” they would pursue to bring government officials to justice. The question received applause from the audience, and multiple speakers supported using their authority for arrests. Washington Sheriff Bob Songer opined, “It’s a fight that needs to be fought.” https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/jan-6-pardoned-retribution/
Disturbing. Deeply deeply disturbing. Applause from the audience of sheriffs for asking how far they would go to mete out justice. And note the last sentence, Bob Songer. I wrote about him in an earlier article talking about the dangers of Sheriffs and their posses. Here he is again. These people all run in the same conspiracy circles and they are absolutely all working together in this coup against our democracy.
In rural Klickitat County, Sheriff Bob Songer — who has drawn national attention for his belief that sheriffs have the constitutional authority to decide which laws they will enforce — has been building a posse of volunteers nearly 10 times larger than the number of deputies, InvestigateWest’s Paul Kiefer reported. The posse is accountable to Songer alone, and he has warned that if the federal or state government tried to confiscate civilian firearms, he would use the posse to fight back. The posse has drawn concerns from residents worried about Songer’s association with far-right movements, as well as the potential liability to the county in the event of a violent encounter between a posse member and a citizen.
https://www.investigatewest.org/news/a-controversial-sheriffs-posse-an-uninvestigated-disappearance-and-a-wealth-of-obstacles-to-public-records-a-year-of-investigative-report-17757349
These right-wing extremists have been at it for decades. Our government played softball with these extremists and now we’re all paying the price. These right-wing extremists have been gearing up for civil war since the end of the first civil war. It was right-wing terrorists that bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995.
Over the past decade, right-wing extremists have committed the majority of extremist-related killings in all years but one-2016, the year of the shooting spree at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, by a person motivated by Islamist extremism. Of the 443 people killed at the hands of extremists over that 10-year period, 333 (or 75%) were killed by right-wing extremists. https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115286/documents/HHRG-118-GO00-20230208-SD008.pdf
Before Bundy Ranch
What happens when constitutional vigilantes go mainstream.
April 23, 2014
Constitutional vigilantism of the type on display at Bundy Ranch last week has been a recurrent feature on the margins of American political life. What is new—and dangerous—is that it has suddenly moved from the margins to the mainstream. And it comes with guns.
Last week a mob of more than 1,000 armed protesters forced the Bureau of Land Management to back down from enforcing federal grazing fees. The protesters came out in support of local rancher Cliven Bundy, who’s been letting his cattle graze on federal land in Nevada for more than 20 years without a permit. “We’re standing up for the Constitution,” declared Bundy, to the delight of the television cameras. Bundy and his supporters have a simple constitutional worldview: They do not recognize the federal government’s constitutional authority to manage public lands within a state, and they believe the move against Bundy results from a corrupt political system determined to deprive the people of their rights. But instead of trying to convince a court to adopt their constitutional views or work through the political system, Bundy and his supporters have shown that they can enforce their interpretation of the Constitution by waving guns at federal officials.
The Bundy Ranch protest certainly fits within a long constitutional history in which radical groups have sought to effectuate their dissident views of the Constitution through violence. The Ku Klux Klan is the prototypical constitutional vigilante group. Operating outside formal legal structures, the Klan always asserted it was acting to restore the true meaning of the Constitution, which, in the words of a 1925 Klan publication, “put into written form the immortal principles of liberty, popular government, and equal justice, which were the fruitage of Anglo-Saxon character.” The Klan understood itself to be the vigilant protector of white Protestant values embodied in the Constitution, when local law enforcement was unwilling to step up.
The closer historic precedent for the Bundy Ranch protesters is the Posse Comitatus movement, however, launched around 1970 by Christian Identity pastor William Gale, which turned the Klan philosophy of enforcing the Constitution through armed citizen groups against a new enemy: the federal government. Gale warned federal officials: “You’re either going to get back to the Constitution of the United States or officials are gonna hang by the neck until they’re dead.” Like many on the radical right, then and now, the Posse movement asserted that much of what the federal government does is tyrannical and unconstitutional—most especially income tax laws, gun control, the Federal Reserve system, and federal management of public lands. Like many on the radical right of today, the Posse movement advocated a local philosophy of government, in which the county is the authentic unit of government. In Posse philosophy, the county sheriff was seen as the nation’s highest law enforcement officer, and he owed a duty to protect the people from federal tyranny. If the sheriff refuses to do his duty, the movement proclaimed, the people themselves should form armed posses to arrest and hang any official who violates the Constitution.
The distinctive feature of the Posse movement was the call for armed groups of citizens to take the Constitution into their own hands and enforce it through force. Murder and violence were the inevitable result. Posse groups kidnapped federal officials, put them on trial through the Posse’s own “common law” courts, and imposed brutal punishments. In 1983 former Posse member Gordon Kahl shot and killed two U.S. marshals and injured two others attempting to serve him papers for tax evasion.
By the early 1990s, the Posse Comitatus movement had largely faded away in response to strong state and federal law enforcement, but the militia movement soon replaced it and offered a similar philosophy. Like the Posse movement, militia leaders argued that the nation must return to the true (in their view) meaning of the Constitution. Like the Posse movement, militia leaders pointed to a series of perceived federal abuses—gun restrictions, income taxes, the Federal Reserve, and public lands regulation—and called for the formation of armed citizen groups to restore the true meaning of the Constitution through armed resistance. The militia movement justified the threatened use of force by asserting the “insurrectionary theory” of the Second Amendment, which claims that the amendment enshrines the right to bear arms to empower the people to protect themselves against government tyranny, should it ever arise. Militia leaders declared that tyranny was here and the time for armed resistance had come.
The immense dangers posed by the militia philosophy became obvious with the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Although Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were only loosely connected to the militia movement, the bombing demonstrated the catastrophic results of declaring the federal government to be the people’s enemy and calling on the people to rise up to enforce their own constitutional interpretations.
The militia movement, like the Posse movement before it, has largely faded from view, but the philosophy of armed resistance now finds a welcoming home in the Tea Party movement. Militia members form a significant constituency within the Tea Party. For instance, Oath Keepers claims to have enlisted 30,000 military and law enforcement personnel who have taken an oath to disobey a list of orders deemed unconstitutional. Oath Keepers members were out in force at Bundy Ranch. So were members of Richard Mack’s Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, an organization that advocates the old Posse philosophy that the county sheriff has a duty to repel federal officials whenever they encroach on county territory. Mack has said that he “prayed for the day that a sheriff in this country will arrest an IRS agent” for enforcing tax law. Cliven Bundy himself echoed the Posse in demanding that the local sheriff disarm the BLM and called on the protesters to rise up when the sheriff failed to do so.
The protesters at Bundy Ranch voice the same rhetoric of constitutional vigilantism honed by the Klan, the Posse, and the militias. What has changed is that this philosophy is no longer limited to the radical fringe but has become a respectable position offered up by mainstream political figures like Nevada Sen. Dean Heller, who called the protesters “patriots,” and by a stream of Fox News commentators like Sean Hannity and Andrew Napolitano, who called Bundy a hero for standing up to federal abuse.
Emboldened by their apparent victory at Bundy Ranch, the new constitutional vigilantes are asking where they can take the fight next. Cliven Bundy declared it a victory for “We the People.” But that can only be true if we want the Constitution to mean whatever an armed mob says it means.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/04/bundy-ranch-vigilantism-going-mainstream-the-idea-that-the-constitution-is-interpreted-at-the-point-of-a-gun-isnt-new.html
Really fascinating history. It is bizarre to read these words in 2025 and see how many signs our society ignored. How our government failed to do their duty and prosecute these militia movements more strongly. And now they’ve taken power. The extremists have taken power.
We can only speculate as to why AG Merrick Garland never prosecuted trump for his failed coup attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. When I watch Garland speak he doesn’t strike me as being so partisan that he would let trump slide from charges because he is a loyal member of the cult. No, my sense is that Garland was scared. He was scared of appearing to be too partisan, and he was scared of retribution. I think Garland thought that trump wouldn’t win again, and that whoever replaced Garland as the new AG would have to deal with trump. I think that’s why he delayed the January 6 investigations. He was scared of reprisals from people like Raiklin if he were to oversee the prosecution of trump.
There has been an increase in threats against Justice Department employees and other law enforcement officials, members of Congress and their staff in recent years. In June, the attorney general highlighted in congressional testimony "a worrying spike in threats of violence against those who serve the public."
"Those threats have targeted members of Congress, police officers, judges, jurors, election workers and the Justice Department's own employees," he said then.
The attorney general highlighted these threats again Thursday, against the backdrop of a tight presidential race and a fraught political landscape.
"It is dangerous to target and intimidate individual employees of this department simply for doing their jobs," Garland told the workforce. "It is outrageous that you have to face these unfounded attacks because you are doing what is right and upholding the rule of law … You deserve better." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/garland-to-condemn-attacks-threats-against-justice-dept-employees/
Cowardice in Leadership Brought us Here
It is cowardice at all levels of the government that has gotten us to this place. Cowardice of our elected officials. It is cowardice now that prevents congress from being a check on the power of the executive. GOP members have now sat through entire meetings without uttering a word because they were instructed to. “We are all afraid. I'm oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real.” This is a direct quote from Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
We wonder why no one is standing up to this regime. It is because they are all afraid of reprisal. Of retribution. Raiklin and extremist terrorists like him have undoubtably threatened our elected officials in all levels of government with retribution if they do not fall in line with the extremist agenda. They have threatened their family members.
There is no one coming to save us. Do you think ISIS would have given up power peacefully in the middle east if the people there voted them out? So why does anyone think these right-wing extremists would allow us to have another fair and free election, and if they did why do you think they would abdicate power peacefully if they were voted out?
Trump already showed us what he would do if he lost power in an election. He attempted a coup on January 6. He failed, but nevertheless he already demonstrated through the strongest actions that he will not peacefully abdicate power.
Biden, Garland, all of the democratic leadership who held power from 2020-2024 will go down in history with a worse reputation than Neville Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement toward Nazi Germany in the years leading up to WW2. The cowardice of the Democratic leadership in not confronting the threat of extremism and not bringing swift justice to every single person involved after trump’s attempted coup will go down in history as one of the greatest mistakes and acts of cowardice and abdication of their sworn duty to defend this nation against extremism.
The lack of courage in our elected officials to bring swift justice to all of these extremists will be written about as the last domino to fall before America lost its democracy. It will be written about as the last period in which the second American civil war could have been averted through the peaceful application of our laws and law enforcement.
The truth is that our elected officials were all too terrified of these right-wing extremists to act and now it’s too late. The extremists have taken power.
No one is coming to save us. We must all form self-defense groups now.
LINCOLN HEIGHTS, Ohio — Nearly every morning for the last month, Jay has been waking up before sunrise to drive around the streets of Lincoln Heights, patrolling neighborhood bus stops to make sure children are getting to school safely.
“We have a very tight community, so all of our kids, they know us,” he said.
But for anyone outside the community, Jay’s presence might be a mystery. He wears a face covering along with a tactical vest, and Jay is not his real name, which he asked not to use to prevent harassment from hate groups.
He’s a member of the Lincoln Heights Safety and Watch program, an initiative that started shortly after Feb. 7, when a neo-Nazi group waving swastika flags and shouting racial slurs demonstrated on a highway overpass just on the edge of this majority-Black community about 30 minutes north of Cincinnati.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/lincoln-heights-ohio-armed-protection-group-neo-nazi-rally-rcna196240
We must follow the example of this black community in Ohio. We must all form local self-defense groups. No one else is coming to save us.
I fear that the worst will come to pass and psychopaths like Raiklin will be unleashed onto our population with the full backing of the state. Imagine that they do arrest everyone on his list and that they do hold kangaroo trials and then they execute them. Do you think this will sate the blood-lust of these right-wing white supremacist extremists?
I think what we will see, if we allow it to get that far, is that these gangs will roam the streets and ethnically cleans neighborhoods.
Hitler launches the SA
Hitler formed the SA in Munich in 1921, drawing membership from violent anti-leftist and anti-democratic former soldiers (including the Freikorps) in order to lend muscle to the young Nazi Party, using them like a private army to intimidate opponents. According to the Nuremberg Military Tribunal, the SA was ‘a group composed in large part of ruffians and bullies’.
Many of the SA were former soldiers, upset with the way they had been treated after World War One. Germany’s defeat in the war had come as a surprise to the German people, which led to a theory that the brave German army had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by the politicians.
Many Germans hated the government for signing the armistice in November 1918 – and saw the government as the ‘November Criminals’. Hitler used these terms in many speeches to further turn people against the Government.
Speaking politics in public was potentially a dangerous matter at the time. Recognisable by their brown uniforms, similar to those of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, the SA functioned as a ‘security’ force at Nazi rallies and meetings, using threats and outright violence to secure votes and overcome Hitler’s political enemies. They also marched in Nazi rallies and intimidated political opponents by breaking up their meetings.
When fights broke out, the Weimar police appeared powerless, with law and order usually restored by the SA. This enabled Hitler to claim that the Weimar regime lacked leadership and power, and that he was the person who could restore Germany to law and order.
The Beer Hall Putsch
Ernst Röhm became the leader of the SA after taking part in the Beer Hall Putsch (also known as the Munich Putsch) in 1923, a failed coup against the Weimar government in which Hitler lead 600 Brownshirts into a meeting between the Bavarian Prime Minister and 3,000 businessmen.
Röhm had fought in the First World War, reaching the rank of captain, and later joined the Bavarian division of the Freikorps, a virulent right wing nationalist group active during the early years of the Weimar Republic.
The Freikorps, which officially came to an end in 1920, were responsible for the murder of prominent leftists like Rosa Luxemburg. Former members made up a large part of the initial ranks of the SA.
The growth of the Brownshirts
After the Beer Hall Putch, the SA was reorganised, and took part in violent street clashes with communists, and began to intimidate voters into voting for the Nazi Party. Its ranks swelled into the thousands during the 1920s and into the 1930s.
Though Röhm left the Nazi Party, and Germany, during the later half of the 1920s, he returned to lead the Brownshirts in 1931 and watched its numbers swell to 2 million within only 2 years – twenty times as large as the number of troops and officers in the regular German Army.
The vast increase in membership was aided by unemployed men joining up due to the effects of the Great Depression. The Depression had caused American banks to call-in all of their foreign loans (which had helped fund German industry) at very short notice, leading to a significant rise in unemployment. This encouraged people to turn to extreme political parties such as the Nazi’s, who appeared to offer simple solutions to their problems. https://www.historyhit.com/hitlers-bullyboys-the-role-of-the-sa-in-nazi-germany/
It is truly eerie how history is repeating itself. The SA, Hitler’s brownshirts were made up of violent and disgruntled former soldiers, anti-leftist and anti-democratic. This core group of violent extremists were then bolstered by many times more unemployed men created by the great depression. Failures, frustrated with their short-comings in life, seeking power and violence in order to overcome their station in life.
That is exactly what is happening in the US right now. This core group of violent extremists like Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, 3 percenters are now being bolstered by the masses of frustrated losers under the right-wing sphere of influence. These people will not give up power peacefully.
When Hitler finally rose to power the street violence changed and became an adjunct of state power, and Brownshirts set up their own illegal prisons -- 240 where torture was carried out, and eleven early concentration camps, where they acted with impunity. “The centralized locations of many of these provisional prisons and torture chambers made the early SA terror a highly visible and at times audible element of Nazi rule,” Siemens writes. If SA violence during the runup to power was a harbinger of what would transpire when the party achieved power, SA actions when that finally occurred set the tone for the following twelve years.
“Stormtroopers made [Jewish] racial exclusion highly visible,” he writes. “Insulting, spitting at, and beating Jews not only humiliated and terrified the victims of such assaults but also illustrated the new, highly unequal balance of power in German society.” A Stormtrooper entering a Jewish-owned barbershop in Vienna and leaving without paying was doing more than getting a free haircut; he was cutting the Jew from society by showing he didn’t merit the basic exchange of cash. The aim was “to humiliate him and illustrate the new power relations in the city.”
SA men were abject failures in many regards, but the mass nature of the organization meant that many ordinary soldiers had passed through their school and were imbued with the SA vision. As well, former SA men were not lacking among those involved in mass murders in Poland, among other occupied countries — enabled, to quote Sieman, by their “simple Manichean worldview,” which viewed Jews and non-Aryans as less than human.
Siemens notes that the SA was a kind of employment agency for the unemployed, who were legion in the run-up to Hitler’s accession to power. The SA had its own insurance company, from which members were required to purchase polices, resulting in payoffs to members if they were injured in the course of duty, the numbers climbing from 163 cases in 1928 to 14,005 in 1932.
What will a 2nd American Civil War look like?
The violence being enacted against immigrants right now is lifted straight from the pages of history. Violence against jews in Nazi Germany was in plain sight and intentional. It was designed to sow terror throughout society and demonstrate that there was now a class of brutes who were above the law, who could enact violence with impunity. Just as ICE is doing today.
People wonder what a civil war will look like if it comes. I think the civil war has already come. The right have been firing volley after volley. It is the rest of us who have willfully ignored their belligerence time and again. Well, now they’ve seized the reigns of power. Extremists are installed in our government at all levels. Those who aren’t onboard with their agenda are controlled through threats of violence and retribution. No one is coming to save us.
You must form self-defense groups within your communities, now. The only reason things aren’t more overtly violent is because the extremists hold the levers of power. Extreme violence will come once their control starts to slip. And their control will slip, because the majority of American people will not stand for a fascist authoritarian state.
I don’t think a 2nd American Civil War will look like what’s portrayed in the 2024 film “Civil War,” where coalitions of states faced off against the federal government. Our country is far too fragmented. People who live in blue states hold the mistaken notion that they’re in a “safe state.”
Drive 10 minutes outside of any major city, even in California, Washington, and Oregon, and you’ll see trump signs and trump flags everywhere, even in blue states. 70.8% of sheriffs identify as conservative or very conservative with only 1.1% identifying as liberal. Rural Oregon, Washington, and Northern California are a hotbed of white supremacist militia activity.
When it comes to Northern California militia members, look no further than the Cottonwood Militia. This militia, also referred to as the Cottonwood Minutemen and the California State Militia Alpha Company, is deeply interwoven into Shasta County’s political and social fabric.
Although the North State’s most well-known militia is based in Cottonwood, its members – mostly men – live throughout Shasta County and neighboring counties. Since the Cottonwood Militia’s start, it’s conducted training exercises throughout Northern California.
The Cottonwood Militia was founded by Paul “Woody” Clendenen in a dusty barn at his Cottonwood ranch shortly after the 2008 Presidential Election. Politics play a big part in the militia mindset. The now 56-year-old Clendenen explained in a recent interview that he viewed Republican candidate John McCain as a “RINO,” that is, “Republican in Name Only”. https://anewscafe.com/2023/01/29/redding/straight-outta-cottonwood-the-story-of-northern-californias-maga-outlaw-militia/
These right-wing terrorists have already demonstrated what a 2nd American Civil War will look like. They will murder federal agents in ambushes like Gordon Kahl did in 1983 when he murdered two federal marshals and then a local sheriff. They will blow up truck-bombs like they did at the Oklahoma City Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995. They will target elected officials for kidnap and murder like far-right extremists plotted to kidnap, brutally torture and murder Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer(terrorists who the trump DOJ is now taking a “hard look” at pardoning). They will commit targeted and brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns like mass shooter Dylan Roof did in 2015 when he murdered 9 black congregants at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.
Two federal marshals are murdered by North Dakota farmer and Posse activist Gordon Kahl when they try to arrest him for criminal refusal to pay taxes, a leading issue for the Posse. Kahl escapes and evades arrest for four months, traveling through a network of safe houses, before dying four months later in an Arkansas shootout in which he first kills a local sheriff. https://www.splcenter.org/timeline-land-use-and-patriots/
And now they will have the full backing of the state behind them. This is what a 2nd American Civil War will look like and Kevin Roberts, the extremist behind the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 has said: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
In short, white supremacists are the biggest threat in America 🇺🇸. They've always been the greatest threat. Yet the FBI refuses to put them in the category of terrorists. They are domestic TERRORISTS. We need to call them for what they are. The pussy footing that the FBI has done with this group of people is what's allowed them to metastasize to what it has become today. This may be controversial what I am about to say. But, HATE should never have been considered part of free speech. What these hate filled racists people have been allowed to do is terrorize minority communities with their Nazi flags, their AR-15s strapped to their bodies. That's intimidation, and a clear warning ⚠️ sign to not fuck with them or they'll act on impulse to commit violence. That is NOT freedom of speech. The government should have never allowed this. If Nazis want to go out and show their hate and hateful glgas they should be arrested on the spot. That would have deterred this behavior. Germany 🇩🇪 doesn't allow people to walk around with national regalia or the swastika flag they get ARRESTED! As it should be! Our laws need to change when it comes to hate.
Now, as far as this moron piece of shit Railkin, he has little man syndrome. He's so damn insecure and so hateful and deranged that he's willing to do his worse. What a pathetic weasel. 😤🤬
Thank you 🙏🏻