‘Its Own Domestic Army’: How the G.O.P. Allied
Itself With Militants
Actions taken by paramilitary groups in Michigan last
year, emboldened by President Donald J. Trump, signaled a profound shift in
Republican politics and a national crisis in the making.
David D.
Kirkpatrick Mike McIntire
By David D.
Kirkpatrick and Mike McIntire
Published
Feb. 8, 2021
Updated
Feb. 9, 2021, 12:21 a.m. ET
LANSING,
Mich. — Dozens of heavily armed militiamen crowded into the Michigan Statehouse
last April to protest a stay-at-home order by the Democratic governor to slow
the pandemic. Chanting and stomping their feet, they halted legislative
business, tried to force their way onto the floor and brandished rifles from
the gallery over lawmakers below.
Initially,
Republican leaders had some misgivings about their new allies. “The optics
weren’t good. Next time tell them not to bring guns,” complained Mike Shirkey,
the State Senate majority leader, according to one of the protest organizers.
But Michigan’s highest-ranking Republican came around after the planners
threatened to return with weapons and “militia guys signing autographs and
passing out blow-up AR-15s to the kiddies on the Capitol lawn.”
“To his
credit,” Jason Howland, the organizer, wrote in a social media post, Mr.
Shirkey agreed to help the cause and “spoke at our next event.”
Following
signals from President Donald J. Trump — who had tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”
after an earlier show of force in Lansing — Michigan’s Republican Party last
year welcomed the support of newly emboldened paramilitary groups and other
vigilantes. Prominent party members formed bonds with militias or gave tacit
approval to armed activists using intimidation in a series of rallies and confrontations
around the state. That intrusion into the Statehouse now looks like a portent
of the assault halfway across the country months later at the United States
Capitol.
As the
Senate on Tuesday begins the impeachment trial of Mr. Trump on charges of
inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol rioting, what happened in Michigan helps explain
how, under his influence, party leaders aligned themselves with a culture of
militancy to pursue political goals.
Michigan
has a long tradition of tolerating self-described private militias, which are
unusually common in the state. But it is also a critical electoral battleground
that draws close attention from top party leaders, and the Republican alliance
with paramilitary groups shows how difficult it may be for the national party
to extricate itself from the shadow of the former president and his appeal to
this aggressive segment of its base.
“We knew
there would be violence,” said Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan
Democrat, about the Jan. 6 assault. Endorsing tactics like militiamen with
assault rifles frightening state lawmakers “normalizes violence,” she told
journalists last week, “and Michigan, unfortunately, has seen quite a bit of
that.”
Six Trump
supporters from Michigan have been arrested in connection with the storming of
the Capitol. One, a former Marine accused of beating a Capitol Police officer
with a hockey stick, had previously joined armed militiamen in a protest
organized by Michigan Republicans to try to disrupt ballot counting in Detroit.
The chief
organizer of that protest, Meshawn Maddock, on Saturday was elected co-chair of
the state Republican Party — one of four die-hard Trump loyalists who won top
posts.
Ms. Maddock
helped fill 19 buses to Washington for the Jan. 6 rally and defended the April
armed intrusion into the Michigan Capitol. When Representative Rashida Tlaib, a
Michigan Democrat, suggested at the time that Black demonstrators would never be
allowed to threaten legislators like that, Ms. Maddock wrote on Twitter,
“Please show us the ‘threat’?”
“Oh that’s
right you think anyone armed is threatening,” she continued. “It’s a right for
a reason and the reason is YOU.”
The lead
organizer of the April 30 armed protest, Ryan Kelley, a local Republican
official, last week announced a bid for governor. “Becoming too closely aligned
with militias — is that a bad thing?” he said in an interview. Londa Gatt, a
pro-Trump activist close to him was named last month to a leadership position
in a statewide Republican women’s group. She welcomed militias and Proud Boys
at protests, posting on the social media site Parler: “While BLM destroy/murder
people the Proud Boys are true patriots.” Prosecutors have accused members of
the Proud Boys of playing a leading role in the Jan. 6 assault.
Two weeks
after the Statehouse protest, Mr. Shirkey, the Republican leader, appeared at a
rally by the same organizers, onstage with a militia member who would later be
accused of conspiring to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
“Stand up
and test that assertion of authority by the government,” Mr. Shirkey told the
militiamen. “We need you now more than ever.”
After the
riot in Washington, some argue such endorsements endanger the future of the
party. “It is like the Republican Party has its own domestic army,” said Jeff
Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan party and a vocal Trump
critic.
A Long
History
A
quarter-century before the mob rampaged through the U.S. Capitol, a
paramilitary leader from Michigan sat in the same building and delivered an
early warning shot.
Norman
Olson, founder of the Michigan Militia, appeared in June 1995 before a Senate
committee investigating the growth of the anti-government movement after the
Oklahoma City bombing that April. Dressed in military fatigues with a
“Commander Olson” patch on his shirt, he spoke with contempt.
“We stand
against oppression and tyranny in government,” Mr. Olson said, “and many of us
are coming to the conclusion that you best represent that corruption and
tyranny.”
For many
Americans, it was jarring to listen to self-appointed defenders of the
Constitution justify taking up arms in a paranoid vision of government
overreach. But back in Michigan they were used to it.
Roughly a
dozen to 18 armed groups are scattered across Michigan in mostly rural
counties, their membership fluctuating with political and economic currents.
Estimates of active members statewide are generally in the hundreds.
The state’s
lenient gun laws — it is permissible to openly carry a firearm in public — also
make it a welcoming place for other armed extremists. Members of the Proud Boys
or Boogaloo movement routinely showed up at protests in Michigan last year and
sometimes got into fights with Black Lives Matter activists.
For many of
the more traditional militias, however, socializing is often as much a priority
as drilling. Firearms training is mixed with camping and family outings — last
fall, members of the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia gathered for a picnic
in a park where children tossed beanbags, mothers grilled cheeseburgers and
AR-15 rifles leaned against lawn chairs. Some have websites where they sell
T-shirts and carry ads for gun shops.
But woven
through Michigan’s militia timeline is a persistent strand of menace. In the
early 20th century, the Black Legion, a paramilitary group that included public
officials in Detroit and elsewhere, began as an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan
and was linked to numerous acts of murder and terrorism.
Timothy
McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing,
were reported to have associated with militia members in Michigan, though Mr.
Olson said they had been turned away because of their violent rhetoric. In the
aftermath, militias were largely exiled to the fringes of conspiracy politics,
preparing for imagined threats from the New World Order.
But in
recent years, as the Republican Party has drifted further to the right, these
groups have gradually found a home there, said JoEllen Vinyard, an emeritus
professor of history at Eastern Michigan University who has studied political
extremism. Much of their cooperation is centered on defending gun ownership,
she said.
“I think
there is a fair amount of sympathy in the Republican Party for these people
that wasn’t there in the past,” Dr. Vinyard said. “It’s a much closer
relationship now.”
The
Covid-19 Revolt
If Michigan
Republicans and militant groups had increasingly found themselves sharing the
same ideological space, their common ground became literal last year, as an
escalating series of events drew them together for protests and rallies. They
began with objections to the governor’s lockdown orders.
Republicans
have controlled both houses of the Michigan Legislature for a decade and held
the governor’s mansion for the eight years before Ms. Whitmer took office in
2019. Mr. Trump’s brash nationalism had alienated moderate Republicans and
independents while pushing the party to the right.
By last
April 1, Covid-19 had killed more than 300 people in Michigan, primarily in
Detroit, and Ms. Whitmer ordered all nonessential businesses closed. Ms.
Maddock wasted no time rallying opposition, calling for a protest on April 15.
A national
advisory board member of the Women for Trump wing of the president’s
re-election campaign, she appeared often with Mr. Trump and his surrogates on
their many visits to Michigan. Her husband, Matt Maddock, the owner of a bail
bond business who has boasted of personally apprehending bail jumpers, is a
state lawmaker from a Detroit suburb.
In the
first major protest in the country against stay-at-home orders, thousands of
cars, trucks and even a few cement mixers jammed the streets around the
Statehouse in Lansing, in what Ms. Maddock called Operation Gridlock. About 150
demonstrators left their vehicles to chant “lock her up” from the Capitol lawn
— redirecting the 2016 battle cry about Hillary Clinton against Ms. Whitmer. A
few waved Confederate flags. About a dozen heavily armed members of the
Michigan Liberty Militia turned up as well.
Ms. Maddock
declared Michigan a “tyranny” that night on the Fox News Channel, though she
later distanced herself from the armed men. “Of course the militia is
disappointing to me, the Confederate flag — look, they’re just idiots,” she
later told Bridge Michigan, a nonprofit news organization.
Mr. Trump
tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” two days later, and Ms. Maddock’s protest inspired
a wave of others around the country.
When local
armed groups in Michigan began discussing more demonstrations, most Republicans
shunned them at first. “They were scared of the word ‘militia,’” recalled Phil
Robinson, a member of the Liberty Militia.
But his
group found eager promoters in Mr. Kelley, a real estate broker and Republican
planning commissioner in a suburb of Grand Rapids, and Mr. Howland, a local
sales consultant who had been posting online videos minimizing the pandemic.
They called the stay-at-home restrictions “unconstitutional” and formed the
American Patriot Council “to restore and sustain a constitutional government,”
Mr. Kelley said in an interview.
As the
Legislature met on April 30 to vote on extending the governor’s restrictions,
Mr. Kelley and his militia allies convened hundreds of protesters, including
scores of armed men, some with assault weapons. One demonstrator hung a noose
from the back of his pickup. Another held a sign warning that “tyrants get the
rope.” Dozens entered the Capitol, some angrily demanding entrance to the lower
chamber.
“We were
harassed and intimidated so that we would not do our jobs,” said Representative
Donna Lasinski, leader of the Democratic minority. Lawmakers were terrified,
she added.
Mr.
Maddock, the Republican legislator and Ms. Maddock’s husband, recognized some
of the intruders and left the House floor to confer with them. “I like being
around people with guns,” he later told The Detroit News.
Mr. Trump
sided with them, too. “The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put
out the fire,” he tweeted. “These are very good people.”
Other
Republicans also came to accept the presence of armed activists. Ms. Gatt, who
took part in protests organized by Mr. Kelley and Ms. Maddock, said she felt
“intimidated by the militia when I first started getting involved,” but soon
changed her mind.
“I was able
to see that they are patriots that love their country like the rest of us,” she
said, adding that they are “all Republicans.”
Mr.
Shirkey, the Senate leader, was initially more cautious. The founder of a
manufacturing company who is known for singing hymns from the podium, Mr.
Shirkey issued a statement on April 30 criticizing “intimidation and the threat
of physical harm” and calling the armed protesters “a bunch of jackasses.”
Yet he had
mingled with them in the gallery. Surrounded by militiamen about two weeks
later in Grand Rapids, at an event also organized by Mr. Howland and Mr.
Kelley, the senator said in a speech that they had taken him to task for his
“jackasses” comment and he effectively retracted it.
He also met
privately in his office that month with a handful of militia leaders — to
establish a “code of conduct,” he explained in an interview. “Do you tell your
people to make sure that there’s not a live round in a chamber?” he said,
recounting the conversation. “That’d be a good start.”
In May,
armed men stood watch for days outside a barbershop in Owosso, defending the
proprietor from the police so he could cut hair in defiance of the lockdown.
Ms.
Maddock, following suit, then arranged for hairdressers to offer their services
on the Capitol lawn, again watched over by armed men.
The state
G.O.P. quickly jumped into the fight. In June, a nonprofit group linked to the
Republican Party began providing more than $600,000 to a new advocacy group run
in part by Ms. Maddock that was dedicated to fighting coronavirus restrictions.
A charity tied to Mr. Shirkey kicked in $500,000.
Critics
argued that race was an unstated factor in the battle over the stay-at-home
order. The Republicans who rallied against the rules were mostly white
residents of rural areas and outer suburbs. But more than 40 percent of the
deaths in Michigan early on were among African-Americans, concentrated in Detroit,
who made up less than 15 percent of the state’s population.
Those
tensions spilled into the open last summer when police killings of
African-Americans set off protests around the country.
The Black
Lives Matter protests in Michigan were rarely violent or destructive, and the
largest took place in Detroit. But Republicans in the rest of the state reacted
with alarm to the flashes of violence elsewhere around the country, and
President Trump reinforced their fears with his warnings about “antifa.”
Calls to
stand up to the feared rioters brought the party and its militant allies even
closer together.
“Liberals
look for trouble and civil unrest and conservatives PREPARE for it,” Gary
Eisen, a Republican state legislator and owner of a concealed-weapon training
business, wrote on his Facebook page. “I thought maybe I would load up a few
more mags,” he added, later saying he had been joking.
In June,
about 50 militiamen called together by Mr. Kelley squared off against a few
dozen Black Lives Matter protesters over a statue of a Confederate soldier in
his town, Allendale. “There were children there, and militia members were
pointing guns at people,” said Ali Bates, 20, an activist with the Black Lives
Matter movement.
Mr. Kelley
said he feared what was coming to Allendale. “Statues all over the country were
getting torn down, people were lighting things on fire, there were riots
everywhere,” Mr. Kelley said in an interview, echoing Mr. Trump. “You are not
going to come here and destroy public property.”
He accused
Democrats of encouraging violence. “The Democrats have got antifa; they have
got BLM,” he said. “The Democrats championed all of this stuff from a
leadership level.”
More
prominent Michigan Republicans portrayed the Black Lives Matter movement as a
looming threat, too. Ms. Maddock told the news site MLive.com that the
“destruction” caused by the protests was “absolutely devastating” and
“inexcusable.”
Armed
militiamen responded by turning up at some protests as vigilante guards. In
August, dozens of Proud Boys marched in Kalamazoo, Mich., the site of several
Black Lives Matter demonstrations, saying they wanted to support the police.
They took pepper spray and used it in fist fights with activists.
At the peak
of the protests against police violence, though, Mr. Kelley’s American Patriot
Council still aimed its sharpest attacks at Governor Whitmer and her stay-at-home
order. It released public letters urging the federal authorities to arrest her
for violating the Constitution by issuing a stay-at-home order. “Whitmer needs
to go to prison,” Mr. Kelley declared in a video he posted on Facebook in early
October that was later taken down. “She is a threat to our Republic.”
A few days
later, federal agents arrested more than a dozen Michigan militiamen, charging
them in a plot to kidnap the governor, put her on trial and possibly execute
her.
At least
two of the suspects had participated in the April 30 protest at the Capitol, as
well as the gathering with Mr. Shirkey in Grand Rapids. Prosecutors said that
the men had tried to recruit other conspirators at an American Patriot Council
rally. (Mr. Kelley and Mr. Shirkey denied any knowledge of the plot.)
It was the
culmination of months of mobilization by armed groups, accompanied by
increasingly threatening language, and Mr. Trump declined to condemn the
plotters. “People are entitled to say, ‘Maybe it was a problem, maybe it
wasn’t,’” he declared at a rally in Michigan.
Hours after
the Nov. 3 election, Ms. Maddock wrote on Facebook: “35k ballots showed up out
of nowhere at 3 AM. Need help.” She urged Trump supporters to rush to “monitor
the vote” at a ballot-counting center in Detroit. “Report to room 260 STAT.”
As the counting
showed Mr. Trump had lost the pivotal state, Michigan Republicans began a
two-month campaign to overturn the result and keep him in power, channeling the
momentum of the previous year’s battles over Black Lives Matter and Covid-19.
Mr. Kelley,
with Mr. Howland and their armed militia allies, showed up for a rowdy protest
outside the ballot counting. Later that month Mr. Kelley told a rally outside
the Statehouse that the coronavirus was a ruse to persuade the public to
“believe Joe Biden won the election,” The Lansing State Journal reported. One
woman held a sign saying “ARREST THE VOTE COUNTERS.”
When
attempts to stop the counting failed, Ms. Maddock in December led 16 Republican
electors trying to push into the Michigan Capitol to disrupt the casting of
Democratic votes in the Electoral College. During a “Stop the Steal” news
conference in Washington the next day, she vowed to “keep fighting.”
Marching
toward the Capitol on Jan. 6, she tweeted that the throngs were “the most
incredible crowd and sea of people I have ever walked with.”
She also
pushed back on Twitter against an observer urging Senator Mitch McConnell, the
Republican leader, to take control of his party. “That’s where you’re very
wrong,” she said. “It’s Trump’s party now.”
Ms. Maddock
has condemned the violence and said she took no part. “When it comes to
militias or the Proud Boys, I have no connection whatsoever to them,” she wrote
in an email.
Mr. Kelley
and Mr. Howland were filmed outside the U.S. Capitol during the riot. Both men
said they did not break any laws, and argued that the event was not “an
insurrection” because the participants were patriots. “I was there to support
the sitting president,” Mr. Kelley said.
Ms. Gatt,
the Republican activist, had posted a video on Facebook of herself in
Washington for a rally in December talking with members of the Proud Boys,
saying: “I hang out with the Michigan Proud Boys.”
During the
Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, she climbed scaffolding set up for the
inauguration: “I made it to the top of the Capitol,” she bragged on Facebook.
Mr.
Shirkey, the Michigan Senate leader who came around to work with the militias,
declined to follow the movement behind Mr. Trump all the way to the end.
Summoned to the White House in November, Mr. Shirkey refused the president’s
entreaties to try to annul his Michigan defeat.
But in an
interview last week, the lawmaker said he nonetheless empathized with the mob
that attacked Congress.
“It was
people feeling oppressed, and depressed, responding to what they thought was
government just stealing their lives from them,” he said. “And I’m not
endorsing and supporting their actions, but I understand where they come from.”
David D.
Kirkpatrick is an international correspondent based in London and the author of
"Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle
East." In 2020 he shared a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on covert Russian
interference in other governments and as the Cairo bureau chief from 2011 to
2015 he led coverage of the Arab Spring uprisings. @ddknyt • Facebook
Mike
McIntire is a reporter with the investigations unit. He won a Pulitzer Prize
for his reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election,
and has written in depth on campaign finance, gun violence and corruption in
college sports. @mmcintire
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