US militias forge alliances with conspiracy
theorists ahead of election
Anti-government and anti-science advocates joined by
founder of militia group at Red Pill Expo in Georgia
Ed
Pilkington
@edpilkington
Wed 14 Oct
2020 08.30 BSTLast modified on Wed 14 Oct 2020 09.26 BST
Armed
militia groups are forging alliances in the final stages of the US presidential
election with conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers who claim the coronavirus
pandemic is a hoax, intensifying concerns that trouble could be brewing ahead
of election day.
Leading
advocates of anti-government and anti-science propaganda came together at the
weekend, joined by the founder of one of the largest militia groups. The rare
connection occurred at the Red Pill Expo, a conference convened on Jekyll
Island, Georgia – a symbolic location as it is the birthplace of the US Federal
Reserve, a popular bogey figure for conspiracy theorists.
The summit,
staged indoors in front of a packed and maskless audience of about 350, was
headlined by Stewart Rhodes, president of the Oath Keepers. The militia, which
turned up menacingly at several Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests over the
summer and has acted as a vigilante squad at numerous Donald Trump campaign
rallies, has links to 25,000 current or past members, mostly military or police
veterans.
Rhodes
aroused the crowd of “Red Pillers”, as they called themselves, with incendiary
language. He denounced BLM as a “communist front” and encouraged attendees to
seek training in firearms and militia activity as the election approaches.
“You are
your own self-defense,” he said. “You must organize yourselves in the next 30
days in your towns and counties. We have members in every state in the union
and we are standing them up right now.”
Rhodes said
the turbulence around “radical left” protests had brought “a flood of special
warfare operatives into the Oath Keepers”. He cited former navy Seals and
special force personnel from Fort Bragg, the US army garrison in North
Carolina.
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A number of
groups monitoring far rightwing paramilitary activity have warned in recent
weeks that militia groups and individuals online are increasingly focusing
their attentions on the presidential election. The chatter has been fueled by
Trump’s provocative remarks casting doubt on the integrity of the voting process
and calling on his supporters to turn up at polling places on election day.
Anxiety is
also growing around the activities of white supremacist domestic terrorist
groups, which federal agencies now recognize as an especially dangerous threat.
Last week six people were charged in a plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan,
Gretchen Whitmer.
At the Red
Pill gathering, the Oath Keeper president set his sights openly on election
day. He said that on 3 November “we will have our men deployed outside the
polling stations to make sure you are protected, especially in swing states”.
Rhodes’
appearance marked an unusually overt fusion of interests between armed
far-right groups and anti-government and anti-pharmaceutical conspiracy
theorists. Several of his fellow keynote speakers denounced the coronavirus
pandemic as a fraud cooked up by global elites as a ploy to subjugate the
American people.
Betsy
Quammen, author of a book on the 2014 Bundy standoff in Nevada who attended the
Red Pill event as a monitor, said the union of disparate virulent movements was
troubling. “As somebody who’s been studying militia manoeuvring and conspiracy
theorists, it’s disconcerting to see these various groups uniting under a
common banner of mistrust about coronavirus.”
She added
that the timing of the meeting so close to the election was alarming.
Among the
speakers at the summit, Mikki Willis followed Rhodes in talking up the actions
of armed rightwing individuals. Willis is known for having been the director of
Plandemic, the viral video that spread the lie that coronavirus was invented by
big drug companies and Bill Gates, among others.
He boasted
to the Red Pill audience that he had also made a laudatory video about Kyle
Rittenhouse, the teenager charged in August in the killing of two people during
anti-police brutality protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Willis praised the
alleged shooter, whom Trump also notably failed to denounce, as a “very
stand-up citizen”.
David Icke,
the British conspiracy theorist widely denounced for antisemitic hate speech,
was beamed into the summit by video from the UK. He traded misinformation about
the “pandemic hoax”, accusing a global “cult” of elites of having creating a
coronavirus vaccine that was in fact a “sterilization agent” that would be used
to destroy humanity.
Icke also
encouraged school kids to refuse to wear masks, which he called “face diapers”.
Two other
major strains of misinformation were represented at the weekend. Del Bigtree,
producer of the anti-vaccination film Vaxxed, which features the disgraced
British doctor Andrew Wakefield, also portrayed the pandemic as a global
conspiracy aiming to take control over people’s lives.
Bigtree
pointed to a poll last month that suggested that two-thirds of Americans would
be hesitant to get a Covid vaccine when it first became available. He said the
survey showed the anti-vaccination movement was winning: “Man, does it feel
good!”
He also
praised Trump as a “brave individual” and someone “I’ve watched wear a mask
less than anyone else”.
The last
group given a voice at the gathering were peddlers of industrial bleach, who
market the chemical as a “miracle cure” for all known ailments including
malaria, HIV/Aids, cancer and Covid-19. Kerri Rivera, a leading advocate of
chlorine dioxide as a treatment for autism, talked to the summit by video link
from Germany.
“If people
took chlorine dioxide for most illnesses, few doctors would be needed and the
pharmaceutical industry would be bankrupted,” she said.
She also
claimed the bleach, which is used in industrial textile manufacturing, had no
major side effects. In fact, the US Food and Drug Administration has warned
that consuming it can be life-threatening and incidents of death have been
recorded.
Several
leading bleach pushers in the US are currently in jail on federal charges.
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