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I would love your reaction to this.

I mean, this is something that we've come across

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in like a group that's recruiting veterans.

So if you like, what an extreme.

You look at, like questions 15, 16, and 17.

[dramatic music]

Jesus. [chuckling]

So I'm looking at an intake questionnaire

for a violent extremist group,

and I'm gonna read you three of the questions.

Question 15, are you in the military or a veteran?

If so, which branch?

16, if it comes down to it,

would you go against the oath you took

in the military and law enforcement?

You could end up fighting against

your military/law enforcement brothers.

I,

I mean, I think you gotta consider where somebody has to be

in order to say yes to those three questions.

And also some of the capabilities and training

that some of these individuals bring.

There are places in our military

where we are trained to start and fuel insurgencies.

There are places in our military where we are trained

to overthrow governments,

or work with armed militias

in order to do that sort of thing.

I'm not saying this to be alarmist,

and I don't think we need to be afraid of our veterans.

What I do think is that we need

to have a solid understanding

of how badly this could escalate.

We're not at the point where violence

is the solution to our problems,

but there are a lot of people

trying to convince vets and others that we are,

and that is a very dangerous thing.

[Speaker 1] Today, domestic terrorism

is the greatest terrorist threat facing the United States.

[Speaker 2] The threat is real, and we are all at risk.

For decades, violent extremist groups

have sought to infiltrate our military

to gain tactical training

and access to weapons and explosives.

[Speaker 3] I do believe the oath means something,

and I know that I'm going directly against people

who think that they also are honoring their oath.

[Speaker 4] I, I do solemnly swear that I will

[Speaker 5] Support the constitutional

of the United States.

[Speaker 6] Against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

[Multiple Speakers] So help me God,

so help me God, so help me, God.

[western music]

Go ahead and fill up this magazine. [exhaling]

Asked a buddy of mine, I said, hey man,

"can you uh..."

can you get me some ammo, some decent ammo?

I can't find any.

He said, yeah, man,

I heard that there's a drug dealer down on the corner.

He's actually slinging ammunition now instead of drugs.

So bought some ammunition from the drug dealer. [laughing]

When people look at these guns,

these rifles and these handguns and so forth,

there's a lot of folks that see something

that causes violence.

They see something that's dangerous

and shouldn't be allowed in society and so forth.

What they don't realize is that this is what

gave us our freedom.

This is what won our independence.

This is what protects us from attack.

It's not just our God-given, right,

to defend ourselves, it's our constitutional right,

but it's also, it's just right,

when you think about it.

This rifle will never hurt or harm anybody

unless something comes up against it.

Baby's ready to rock and roll.

[western music]

Being a Texan,

we're supposed to be able to protect ourselves.

The stuff that they show you on the movies,

that's our real life, that's who we are.

The cowboy way,

and the cowboy way is to be able to defend yourself.

And, I'm proud to say that I can do that,

you know, pretty effectively.

[gun firing]

I learned how to ride a horse when I was about six.

The property that we lived at was a lot like this.

Mesquite trees and so forth.

[gun firing]

My grandfather gave me my first BB gun

and showed me how to aim, how to breathe and shoot.

[gun firing]

I was taught how to hone into a target

and be able to actually execute

with whatever tool I'm using.

[gun firing]

But what you learn in the military and the army is,

your scopes will fail you, your red dots will fail you,

the batteries will wear out, but your irons never ever will.

So I've never had anything on my rifles

other than my iron sites.

Not the best grouping, but from 60 yards, 50 yards,

it'll work.

Up close, they'd all be in the center.

good boy

Come on.

Hey puppy.

I spent my whole life wanting to join the military.

I mean, there's a photo right behind me

of me when I was probably like five years old,

wearing camouflage head to toe with a pair of dog tags.

I feel like most kids that I grew up with

went through a phase of wanting to be

a cop or a firefighter or an army man, right?

I never grew out of that.

[Kristofer whistling] [dog barking]

And when I was 16 years old, September 11th happened,

and it kind of put a different spin on that desire to serve.

And I went to go out and find bad guys and find justice.

So this, when I was 18 years old,

in basic training,

and it's the standard photo that you take

before you know what anything on the uniform means.

So you notice there's no ribbon, no name tag,

anything like that, it's a bare bones uniform.

I was wearing a shirt, jacket, and tie that weren't mine.

I mean, this is ignorance is bliss right here.

That's what this photo is.

The historical record is absolutely clear

that the aftermath of warfare

is a danger point for anti-democratic violence,

for racist violence,

for activity among Klan and white power groups.

There's no question that this is the case.

All of us, men, women, people who have served or not,

old people, children,

everyone becomes more violent in the aftermath of warfare.

I think that what we don't know yet

is what happens to that phenomenon

when we're talking about a 20-year war.

[dark music]

My career started as a enlisted soldier.

I was Private Crow,

and then almost a decade later it ended as Captain Crow.

Over that period, there were well over 100 combat missions

between Iraq and Afghanistan,

and of course felt like I left

that part of my life behind me.

[Speaker On Megaphone] We will take that building.

[Speaker] We're gonna storm the fucking capitol,

fuck you fuckers.

So on January 6th,

I had told all the members of my staff

not to come in to the office.

I had heard reports of Boogaloo Boys and Proud Boys

and others filling flights to come into the Capitol.

[crowd shouting]

I think as a lot of us watched things unfold on the sixth,

and then have looked at a lot of the footage since,

we see things we recognize as veterans.

That's affirmative, Jesse is [indistinct].

[Narrator] On January 6th, 2021,

US military veterans who had sworn an oath

to defend the country were at the vanguard

of a violent attempt to stop Congress

from certifying the 2020 presidential election.

They were determined to keep Joe Biden

from becoming president.

You can actually see, if you look at it,

the militia groups,

you know, the Oath Keepers,

the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys.

They're organized, they're behaving tactically.

They understand the dynamics of a crowd,

and they're maneuvering to exploit that mass of bodies,

so you see an organized line of militia members

with shields ready to go, ready to exploit a breach,

pushing the crowd in certain directions.

The mob broke through into the Capitol.

They evacuated leadership, they evacuated the floor,

but they had forgotten that there were about

two dozen members up in the gallery.

[Member] Everybody stay down, keep down.

The floor of the House was evacuated,

but there was no safe evacuation route,

evidently from the the gallery.

[Oath Keeper] There's no safe place in the United States

for any of these motherfuckers.

Military principle 105, cave means grave.

And that's when I realized we were trapped,

there was no way out,

and we would likely have to make a stand

or fight our way out.

This was one of the most shocking moments of my life.

I made the decision to call my wife

and let her know that I love her

and tell the kids that I love them.

The only time that the US Capitol had been breached before

was in the war of 1812,

and that was care of the British King.

[Rioter] Here we are in the Capitol.

No looking back now, boys, no looking back.

[Oath Keeper] This is what we fucking lived up for,

everything we fucking trained for.

Wow.

This was the kind of experience that I expected

as a US Marine in Iraq,

but could never even imagine happening

as a United States Congressman in Washington, DC.

You know, many people have seen the pictures.

They had barred the door to the gallery.

They were banging on that door

and breaking the glass to that door.

And I've often asked myself,

how did I end up on one side of that door

and my fellow veterans who raised their same right hand

and took the same oath that I took,

how did they end up on the other side of that door?

[crowd shouting]

[Narrator] Nearly 150 law enforcement officers

were injured in the melee.

Five protestors died,

and another four police officers later committed suicide.

[Officer] We've lost the line.

Donald Trump tweeted out a video.

He said, we did a good fucking job.

[Narrator] Among those charged

in connection with the attack,

a disproportionate number are US military veterans.

[explosions]

[dark music]

For me now, the Capitol

is almost like walking around Gettysburg,

or Antietam, or going to Pearl Harbor.

And my son Michael was killed in action in Afghanistan

on June 14th, 2008.

And when you join the military,

there's a lot of competing ideals of why you show up.

And for most of it, there's a large amount of patriotism.

But you never lose focus and never lose sight that,

I'm here in this country maybe to give them a better chance

to experience what we have in America.

Where it's not perfect.

We are trying to form a more perfect union every day,

and we want to give that chance to other people.

My son died doing that in Afghanistan,

only for us to lose that sight here.

Veterans who swear that oath

to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States

against all enemies, foreign and domestic,

of all Americans.

They should understand

how dangerous and unpatriotic this insurrection was.

They were trying to overthrow democratic election results.

They shouted for the hanging of our own Vice President.

That's a coup attempt.

Watching the insurrection happen,

and we're gonna call it that, because that's what it was.

And watching veterans participate,

being at the vanguard of that insurrection,

it just, it's mind boggling.

But I don't have a really good answer for why,

why veterans would do that.

[gun firing]

Though I was trained to blow stuff up,

and run with the infantry, I became this unofficial,

on the ground intelligence reporter.

On May 15th, 2005,

we got called to respond to a body

that was found in a trash dump outside Sadr City.

When we got there, we realized that it wasn't a body,

it was a bunch of bodies,

and I had never experienced anything like it.

And now as I was taking photos,

close up photos of these faces

of victims of murder and torture,

I was looking at their wounds

and looking at the packaging tape

that was wrapped around their eyes

and imagining the terror that they felt.

And every time I snap a picture,

one of those faces freezes.

And the way that it froze on the screen,

it froze in my head.

But that was just a day of deployment.

And I had six and a half months, seven months

left of Iraq to deal with that.

I went in as 11 Bravo to the army.

I scored fairly high,

so I went to Airborne School,

which was gonna be my next step of training

for special forces.

And during that time,

I ended up getting injured really badly.

When I came home,

I had spent my entire adult life up to that point,

either training for combat or in combat.

It was hard for me to think of anything positive in any way,

whether it's for myself or for my country

or for democracy or for the world.

I couldn't help but base my beliefs

and my feelings on my experiences,

all of which had been horrifically fucking negative.

When most come out of the military,

they're coming out to a world

that they no longer understand anymore.

You really get lost in that life

when you're in the military.

And you know what happens is,

you have the camaraderie, the friendship,

all the good things that you have in the military.

And then when you come out,

you kind of have society that's undisciplined, incapable,

and just downright ugly.

Good evening, I'm Jamie Yuccas.

A massive police presence in Portland, Oregon today,

in anticipation of a violent confrontation.

[muffled speaking]

I'm a proud boy.

I'm president of the Hellgate Bridge Crew chapter

in New York City.

I'm also an Air Force veteran.

What we're going through right now

is a war on the US Constitution.

Biggest reason why I joined the Air Force myself,

it's to give back to my country, to serve my country.

I think a lot of that kind of came from my up upbringing.

The family that I grew up in,

very proud to be an American,

very proud of what America stood for,

what it represented around the world, very patriotic.

And I think a lot of those things are what's lost today.

Members of the Proud Boys and Antifa

fought multiple times.

And Mayor Ted Wheeler just sent out a statement late today

saying this past weekend quote, put innocent lives at risk.

[guns firing]

[Narrator] The Proud Boys were founded

in New York in 2016.

You wanna keep on bucking a sleeping bear, guess what?

It's gonna rise up and it's going be 1776

up into this bitch.

[Narrator] And are classified

as an international terrorist organization by Canada.

We're western chauvinists.

What that essentially means is that we're

the biggest cheerleaders

for western values, western culture,

small government, maximum freedom, maximum liberty,

pro-First Amendment, pro-Second Amendment,

glorifying the entrepreneur, venerating the housewife.

We're not militaristic in any way, shape or form.

The fact of the matter is, you have good guys in this world,

you have bad guys in this world,

and the only way to stand up to the bad guys

is to fight them.

[Narrator] They came to prominence in America

in September, 2020 during a presidential debate

between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

[Moderator] White supremacists.

And who would you like me to condemn?

[talking at the same time]

Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.

When I saw the President of the United States

telling an extremist violent organization, stand by,

that was a chilling moment.

That was a chilling moment for me.

It wasn't any different

than a President of the United States

telling Al-Qaeda or telling ISIS, look,

I have a tough election, stand by.

Let me tell you what you need to do.

Did we get a lot of notoriety?

Absolutely, of course we did.

But at the very same time, it's not because we're racists,

it's not because we're white supremacists.

If we think about what the militant right

and white power movement looks like today,

there are many of these groups.

The specifics can change from group to group,

but the overall intent is the same.

The common ideology is simple.

We had power,

we should have power.

Power is being taken away from us,

and by any means necessary, we can get it back.

Fascist groups, you have national socialist groups,

you have southern nationalist groups,

you have all types of groups with all types of creeds.

But ultimately we're all being united

because we all believe in the same thing,

which is ultimately that white people have a right to exist.

[Simon] And whether the we is a white, we.

Jews will not replace us.

Whether the we is an anti-government we,

they're all intertwined.

The more laws they pass,

it's gonna end up the people versus the government.

Right now, we're being peaceful.

In the future, nobody knows

when that breaking point's gonna hit.

Should have hit a long time ago personally for me.

A lot of people think that, ah, you know,

these are knuckleheads and we shouldn't worry about them.

Unfortunately, we said the same thing about the Jihadis,

prior to the events of 9-11.

They live in caves in Afghanistan.

They don't pose any threat to the homeland.

But by the time we decided to go after them, after 9-11,

it was a little bit too late.

[rioters cheering]

I would like to think that we would draw the attention

of people that are from the military

with the military background.

And I think it would be true of like the Three Percenters,

or the Oath Keepers.

The one thread that kind of combines all of our groups

is the US Constitution, our respect for it.

[muffled speaking]

And I signed up to defend this country.

I was essentially joining the Three Percenters already.

The oath of enlistment is the exact oath

of a Three Percenter.

I do solemnly swear.

[All] I do solemnly swear.

That I will support and defend the Constitution.

[All] That I will support and defend the Constitution.

Of the United States.

[All] Of United States

Against all enemies

[All] Against all enemies.

Foreign and domestic.

[All] Foreign and domestic.

In Atlanta, I met up with 3% SF,

and some of the other brothers out there.

And everybody was upset about the election.

I mean basically we're looking at a criminal

that has become our President, illegitimately.

Joe Biden has already harmed this country.

His son has already harmed this country.

We know for a fact that that family is a criminal family.

The situation we're in is a situation of treason.

The punishment for treason is death.

In America, you have the right to be an asshole.

You have the right to have

the most pathetic views in the world.

I don't have to agree with you,

you don't have to agree with me.

That is a right protected by the First Amendment.

I think when we talk about violent extremist groups,

we're talking about individuals that go beyond

the narrative to violence.

People who are planning to attack the US government,

because it's an evil empire.

People who are trying to

kill Jews or kill immigrants or kill black people,

just based on their race or on their religion.

When you move away from the narrative,

as ugly as that narrative is,

to carry out violence based on that narrative,

to recruit individuals to carry out violence

based on that narrative,

then you are a violent extremist.

Then you're frankly a terrorist.

[explosion]

[soldier yelling]

We used to talk about IEDs,

improvised explosive devices in Iraq,

and they were incredibly lethal.

And what we learned as we tried to stop this,

was that the problem was not the bomb itself,

the problem, you had to go left of the boom.

You had to go upstream to the problem

and look at where the problem is coming from.

Where's the energy?

January 6th now.

A militia group had stashes of guns on the outskirts of DC

ready to go on that fateful day during the insurrection.

That's just one of the alarming allegations

from the Justice Department today,

after the feds charged the leader, Stewart Rhodes,

and several members of the right wing group,

the Oath Keepers, with seditious conspiracy.

[Narrator] Stewart Rhodes is a former army paratrooper

with a law degree from Yale.

In 2009, he founded the Oath Keepers,

a shadowy organization that recruited

law enforcement officers,

active duty military and veterans.

Their mission was to supposedly defend the US Constitution,

but it quickly devolved into an armed militia

dedicated to overthrowing the US government.

The founders told us with their wisdom

that we must be the militia.

You will not be secure, you'll not be free without it.

It's time we resurrect that

and become the militia once again.

[Narrator] There are thought to be 35,000 members

in the organization,

most of them heavily armed.

And January 6th was not the first time Rhodes

assembled his forces and an arsenal of weapons.

[News Reporter] A state of emergency

in Louisville, Kentucky,

after a grand jury decided not to indict

three police officers

in the shooting death of Breonna Taylor.

[muffled Protestor] Breonna Taylor.

[News Reporter] Late this afternoon,

protestors clashed with police.

Guys, bring it in.

Pay attention, can't talk and listen at the same time.

You're in a military operation, behave like it.

Overdrive, it's gonna be Bravo team.

And the pawn shop's gonna be Charlie Team.

[Narrator] Following the killing of Breonna Taylor,

the Oath Keepers went to Kentucky

alongside local militia groups.

We're here in Louisville to protect this Shell station,

and also the pawn shop across the street,

and also a private residence.

We can't predict unpredictable, you can't predict chaos,

you can't predict stupid.

[ominous music]

[Speaker] Is there gonna be enough room?

My main message is you gotta get ready

and prepare yourselves and your communities

for what we see coming, where I think it's unavoidable now.

You got too many brainwashed Americans

who have been brainwashed

by communist professors and teachers

to hate their own country.

[protestors chanting] Whose streets? Our streets.

[protestors chanting] What do we want? Justice!

[protestors chanting] When do we want it? Now!

What do you do with someone that hates their own country,

that hates you,

by close extension if you believe in your country still?

Three, two, one, go.

[ominous music]

[Speaker] Right behind you, right behind you.

It's almost like you're in a foreign country

doing a stability operation against an insurgency.

One of our guys up there is SF - Special Forces vet,

and we got another one that's a retired Staff Sergeant, SF.

I'm not surprised that extremist organizations

try to recruit veterans for the credibility that we bring,

but also for our commitment.

And that commitment takes a lot of forms.

Veterans are people in our society

who in many ways have said,

I will do whatever is necessary

to preserve what I believe in,

to preserve the baseline values

and the baseline existence of my society

up to and including violence.

Put a scope on them,

take a peek at 'em, see what they got.

That's same kinda of shit

that they've been doing their whole career.

Now they're doing it here inside the United States.

It's kind of a weird feeling.

I have two purple hearts already and a bronze star.

They said David, the only way we'll call you back in

is if the shit's gonna hit the fan.

I came home to visit my mom in Crestwood, Kentucky.

I was taking a shower,

she come pounding on the door early in the morning.

She pointed at the TV about the time

the second airplane hits, 9-11.

Well, three weeks later I was getting my shots.

Our group was the second group to enter Afghanistan.

Hell yeah, man.

It's, it's so enticing.

I mean,

God you get to fight again.

You're trained in certain things.

You can see the battlefield better.

If you believe the country's under attack,

you have a certain set of skills

that maybe you were trained with, that you can,

help the group around you, right?

You're a force multiplier.

The quintessential examples of a force multiplier

are Special Forces, Army Green Berets,

these 12 man A teams that actually go behind enemy lines

and train up to a battalion,

up to 6 or 700 local indigenous forces on combat skills.

Certainly, I think that's one of the reasons

why some of these extremist groups

are recruiting these individuals

very deliberately into their movements.

They're fucking coming.

We need to get locked and loaded and ready to go.

Hey guys, everybody spread out, get eyes open,

get a good perimeter.

When I was 21 and severely damaged

from a war that I had been lied into

and that my friends were dying for.

When a guy like Stewart Rhodes comes along

with a Yale law degree and they see the eye patch.

They don't know that he shot himself at a range,

but they assume he's a combat wounded vet,

and says like, hey,

you can support and defend the Constitution

in the United States standing with us.

And just repeats the words of the the Second Amendment.

That that's all it took for me to be like, okay, you know,

you've got the pedigree,

you've got the background.

So why should I challenge that?

You know, I have no basis

in experience or education to challenge it.

[sirens blaring]

The challenge with having veterans

directly involved is twofold.

The first is that they bring a certain expertise.

They might bring in organizational skills or military skills

that can make a movement more dangerous.

All right, form up and let's go.

The second thing that's disturbing however,

is particularly in our society, veterans have legitimacy.

They have a particular place of respect.

And when we see veterans involved in something,

it gives some component of legitimacy to that cause.

Our command's been trying to tell us to inform you that

you are breaking curfew right now.

Yes sir.

So if you could just go back to your post

not not by us, just by we will have to enforce curfew.

- Ten-four. - Appreciate it.

Copy that.

Thank you so much.

Veterans have a kind of social cachet

that provides cover for a lot of the extremist activity

that these groups are trying to do.

So if you turn out to a protest

with a bunch of people in uniform,

much like if you turn out with a bunch of women,

you have a different kind of reception

than if you turn out wearing say,

swastikas and hoods and robes.

So when we think about this,

this is along the lines of something like

choosing to come out in polo shirts and khakis,

or choosing to come out

in funny Hawaiian shirts as part of Boogaloo.

Those are deliberate decisions that are made

to create the opportunity for public reception.

And the use of veterans

is one way to do this, among several.

I've not been a part of any militia beforehand,

but once they opened up and said

that they were doing all this BLM,

and I've seen my city on fire,

I was just like, I've had enough.

And so I reached out to my local militia

and I've been with them ever since.

Yeah, straight back.

When you're vulnerable and you're looking for family,

'cause that's what the people you serve with are,

they look like they could be family.

They look like they can provide you that sense of purpose,

that mission, that camaraderie,

that you had in the military,

that you became dependent on,

that became the center of your identity.

They could give that back to you.

And when he tells you to fight,

you have no reason to question that,

because he's giving you purpose and he's giving you mission.

Yeah, yeah.

We got our people across the country making plans,

but there's too many of us.

There's too many veterans, first of all,

too many freaking military veterans.

That's one thing.

I'm not a big fan of the War on Terror

what it did to a lot of our rights.

But one thing it did give us is a massive pool,

huge pool of combat veterans,

and about 95% of them are on the conservative side

or are on the side of the constitution.

So it's not gonna play out very well.

[crowd shouting]

And so when I look at January 6th,

of course there were people who did violence

and climbed gates and caused trouble.

But in my view, they were likely the foot soldiers.

They were the result of the efforts of other people.

There's the man behind the curtain pushing everybody out.

You know these are the half-cocked plans,

the guys who go early.

The people you really have to worry about

are the people you don't even know exist

until you're two years into the conflict,

'cause they're tactically patient and they're watching you.

[Rioter] Oh my god.

And I still am absolutely stunned

that people don't see how awful January 6th was,

and what an indicator that is and how it's escalating.

And anybody who says that this can't happen in a worse way,

either they're ignorant or they're part of the problem.

Overran the capitol.

We're in the fucking capitol, bro.

People shouldn't look at the insurrection

at the capitol as an anomaly.

We should pay attention to the pattern that got us there.

[muffled speaking]

[Klansman] In the name of Jesus Christ,

we light this cross, and as light dispels darkness,

so may his word and his example

dispel the heathen from our midst.

Amen.

[All] Amen. Amen.

[Klansman] By this sign, you will conquer.

White victory.

[All] White victory.

[Klansman] White power.

[All] White power.

[Klansman] We will fight.

[All] We will fight.

There is one American example

of an extraordinarily successful terrorist movement,

and that is of course the Ku Klux Klan.

Many people in the Klan talked about their experience

as a continuation of warfare.

The first wave came after the Civil War,

and here we saw prominent veterans

like Nathan Bedford Forrest,

who rose to leadership of that Klan.

And although it started as a veteran's social organization,

it very quickly pivoted to extralegal violence

targeted at African Americans,

which included night writings, lynchings,

serial rape, serial murder.

All of these things were designed to create terror

in African American communities to control labor pools,

to control local politics

and to keep African Americans from the polls.

One of the main parts of the Jim Crow era

was something that we would think of today

as election subversion.

And we would see in states like Georgia,

where they refused to seat 33 state legislators.

We saw in states like Louisiana where they refused to seat

a duly elected United States Senator,

in North Carolina where they held a coup

to overthrow black leadership in Wilmington.

[Narrator] And in Mississippi when winning elections

by fraud and violence became increasingly difficult,

white politicians turned to the state constitution.

In 1890, Solomon Calhoon, the conventions president

gave delegates their marching orders.

"We came here to exclude the Negro.

Nothing short of this will answer."

The poll tax and literacy tests

that were written into Mississippi law

were so effective at keeping blacks from voting,

that Calhoon's strategy became a model

for the rest of the South,

staying in place for almost another century.

The Klan managed to keep African Americans from voting

for 100 years.

That is an astonishing political success.

And it happened because the Klan was politically powerful,

really well connected, largely in the Democratic party,

not just in the South.

And was able to establish itself as a counter power

that would stop the emergence of new voters,

whether those voters were blacks or indeed Catholics,

who they didn't see as genuinely American.

[Narrator] The next and most politically effective wave

of KKK activity came after World War I.

[trumpet music]

The second Klan that emerges after Birth of a Nation,

a movie that really changes the perception of the Klan,

that Woodrow Wilson as President screens in the White House,

allows a new media savvy

extremist movement to emerge.

And this is when you really saw the group take off,

not just in the South but nationwide.

This is the clan that reached a membership

of some 4 million people and 10% of the state of Indiana.

They were parading in public

on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

And the founder of that organization

had been a veteran of the Spanish-American War.

It comes to a head in 1924.

The Democratic Party has a convention

at Madison Square Garden,

and the Ku Klux Klan decides that it's going to stop

the Democratic Party from condemning Klan violence.

And they pretty much take over the party,

and make sure that it is running on their agenda.

Now, if you want the optimistic story,

four years later the Democratic party changes.

If you want the pessimistic story,

a major political party gets co-opted and taken over

by a violent insurrectionist terrorist movement.

[Narrator] The KKK's grip on the Democratic Party

soon ended, but nearly 100 years later

attempts to subvert free and fair elections have not.

[Caller] You rigged my fucking election,

you fucking piece of shit.

We're gonna try you and we're gonna hang you.

We're talking about 50 and 60 year old ladies

that are just,

that've just been working elections their whole life,

or respected leaders on both sides that are being inundated

with some of the worst types of threats

that you can imagine.

[News Reporter] You and your family

will be killed very slowly.

The death threats came by text to Tricia Rothenberger,

wife of Georgia Secretary of State,

as Trump attacked him incessantly

for standing by the election results in Georgia.

He's an enemy of the people.

Intimidation is a form of voter suppression,

and goes hand in hand with election subversion,

both in our history and today.

They're trying to rig an election

and we can't let that happen.

I hope you're all gonna be poll watchers.

Morning, here to vote?

The entire poll watching program

for the Trump campaign,

was called Army for Trump.

We need every able-bodied man, woman,

to join Army for Trump's election security operation.

The underlying narrative,

the messages that were pushed were one of,

we need to go protect and stop fraud

from coming into our elections.

It was a very militaristic campaign.

[Narrator] To increase its operational effectiveness,

Trump's army enlisted groups like True the Vote,

which had many veterans within its ranks.

As a veteran,

we're sworn to support and defend the constitution.

My brothers and I were willing to shed our blood

on the battlefield

to protect the beliefs of the Iraqi people

so they can vote.

So I'm asking you as Americans

to take involvement in this vote.

The idea that military service entitles you

to talk about protecting the constitution is a real problem,

because it gives a level of justification

these groups do not deserve and have not earned.

If you have any information about

ballot harvesting in your state, go to True the Vote.

It's called truethevote.org.

And I'm sure a lot of people in this audience saw plenty.

If there's always this underlying belief

that people are trying to game this system in an unfair way,

then regardless of the intent of the people

that are brought into that system,

that default will always be there, to police that vote.

And we know that that's going to have

a disproportionate impact on communities of color.

[Texas GOP Official] We're trying to build an army here

that will have the confidence and courage

to come down in here in these areas

where we really need poll workers.

'Cause this is where the fraud is occurring.

You know, those areas that he was pointing out.

There are no allegations of any sort of voter fraud

or shenanigans taking place there in 2020 at all.

The only thing that's known is that black and brown people

vote heavily in those areas.

[Narrator] Harris County,

like the rest of the United States,

has seen its percentage of white residents

decrease dramatically.

50 years ago, white Americans made up

more than 80% of the US population.

By 2044 they will be in the minority.

The demographic change of the United States

away from being a white majority country

towards a multiracial nation and a multicultural nation

is what moves it from simply,

aha, my community is becoming multiracial

and our politics will change because of this,

to we have to stop this because if people can vote

and exercise their rights,

the white majority will be imperiled.

And everywhere I turn,

I have been hearing from my constituents,

they are deeply worried.

They know their history.

They are witnessing what is happening

to our democracy in real time.

[Narrator] In the aftermath of the 2020 election,

Republican legislatures in Georgia and 18 other states

passed a slew of laws

that limited access to the ballot box.

But what is even more disconcerting

is that these politicians in the state legislature

have already laid the tracks

to take over local boards of elections.

Control the count.

We can get to the same place

through bureaucratic violence, as some would say,

as we can get to through actual violence and intimidation.

And when you marry those two,

then you are in a unique era of suppression

and anti-democratic efforts.

[muffled speaking]

Heavenly Father, we thank you

for this wonderful gathering of people

that's come this afternoon, Lord,

to celebrate this grassroot campaign

of keeping America great.

We know that there's groups today

that have brought havoc to our great cities across America.

This militant Marxist groups, Lord,

that would destroy us from being a greatness.

I pray against them.

Holy Spirit in Jesus name.

And everybody said a big old Amen.

[All] Amen.

You joyful warriors and patriots have watched

as your tyrannical governments have separated you

from your churches, from your schools,

from your prosperity, right,

from your families, from your businesses.

But now you can fight back, 'cause that's what we do.

We fight back.

[audience applauding] [person yelling]

How many veterans I got in here?

Let me hear you shout.

[audience shouting]

They're trying to make us a socialist country.

Maybe they're trying to make us a communist country.

I am deadly serious.

The next three years is gonna determine

whether we remain a free country.

That's why, all over America,

we need people like Eric, particularly in the Senate.

[audience cheering]

Mayor Giuliani's never stopped fighting.

He's still on the front lines.

And the day after the election, he said, you know what?

We got some serious irregularities here.

We need to look into this fraud.

And what did you hear from the mainstream media

over and over again?

They said, oh, that's just crazy.

You can't do that.

You can't say that there's any fraud in the election.

Well, I'm proud to tell you I'm the only person in this race

from Missouri who went down to the front lines

in Arizona myself,

to look at the election audit,

and they need to audit the whole election.

They need to audit the whole election.

[Narrator] Eric Greitens is a highly decorated

former Navy Seal and a Rhodes Scholar.

He grew up as a Democrat and after leaving the service,

wrote several bestselling books about humanitarianism.

"Strength and Compassion" is a book

of photographs and essays from eight different countries,

where I did international humanitarian work

and documentary photography.

[Narrator] He also co-founded

the influential veteran nonprofit, The Mission Continues.

While everybody's home sleeping,

we're out here working.

The mission continues, baby.

Our belief that The Mission Continues

was that every single veteran who was coming home

was an asset and that they could all live lives

of purpose and dignity and meaning here at home.

[Narrator] In 2015, he became

the Republican governor of Missouri,

but resigned less than two years later

in the wake of a sex and fundraising scandal.

In 2021, he began his campaign for the US Senate.

When I took the oath to serve

in the United States military,

I took an oath to defend the constitution

against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

And domestic.

[audience applauding]

And folks, let's be clear,

we have a fight on our hands for this country.

And we are here to let the mainstream media know,

and let the left know, and the establishment know,

and let the RINOs know,

that we are going to win, and we're taking back our country.

[audience applauding and cheering]

This is our country and we're taking it back.

[audience applauding and cheering]

There's a cadre of Iraq and Afghanistan era veterans

who were trained in elite military units,

who went to elite schools.

A Plus, we're with you all the way.

Who know better.

And over the last few years have seen Trump's rise to power,

and rather than be disgusted by it,

because it goes against all of our values,

they don't live by those values.

[Charlie] And you went from high school to the Marines?

Yeah, the great thing about the Marine Corps

is that they really force you to shape up.

I like to describe it as a four-year character education,

because they teach you not just how to iron a uniform,

but they teach you about financial management.

They teach you how to make your bed.

They teach you a lot of the skillsets

that you need to be a successful adult.

[Narrator] JD Vance is a former Marine.

Like Stewart Rhodes, he graduated from Yale Law School.

And like Eric Greitens,

he's a best-selling author

who was once a darling of the New York Times.

[Interviewer] Are there commonalities between poor whites,

poor blacks, poor Latinos?

Absolutely, there are things that are shared

across different groups.

And I think that we should take some inspiration from it,

some recognition that we are sort of in this together.

[Narrator] In 2016, he called Donald Trump an idiot.

I'm a never Trump guy.

I never liked him.

[Narrator] And suggested

that he could be an American Hitler.

But four years later,

he changed his tune when he launched his campaign

for Ohio's senate seat.

I wasn't always nice,

but the simple fact is

he's the best president of my lifetime.

And he revealed the corruption in this country

like nobody else.

JD Vance a few years ago,

I think a lot of people across the political spectrum

had a lot of respect for him.

But now we see him pretending to be an idiot.

Are you a racist?

Do you hate Mexicans?

I think it's ridiculous that we're focused

on this border in Ukraine.

I gotta be honest with you,

I don't really care what happens

to Ukraine one way or another.

A guy like Eric Greitens or a guy like JD Vance,

they didn't internalize any of the morals

that are supposed to be instilled in us during our training.

Things like valor and honor and respect.

[guns firing]

They understand when they're lying.

They understand when they're fueling hatred.

I say it all the time, right?

I think the election was stolen from Trump.

And technology companies would not let us

talk about the fact that Joe Biden

is the leader of the world's biggest crime family.

And they recognize that they need to do it

in order to achieve power.

Part of the problem for the young veteran too,

is that some of these manipulative voices

are former high ranking military leaders.

General Michael Flynn.

[crowd cheering]

So when you hear somebody who held sway over you

when you were in uniform,

and now they're out and they're still

commanding that respect,

that has just such a strong purpose.

Trump won.

He won.

[crowd cheering]

He won the popular vote, he won the popular vote,

and he won the electoral college vote.

Ah, you know, Flynn's a character.

He's something special.

It comes a little bit from the comradery

of being a military person.

I can look at Flynn and I can see that

he's got some really, really deep love for this country

and respect for it.

And he does respect his oath.

I am not a conspiracy theorist.

I base my life on facts and judgment,

and what I believe is right for this country,

for this country, period.

Flynn has been exposing truth left and right,

and that's what makes him one of the most

dangerous men in America.

[Narrator] Michael Flynn is a retired

US Army three star general.

His specialty was military intelligence.

Is it trusted?

The intelligence community wants to

validate the sources of information that we have

in order to ensure that it's believable, reliable, relevant.

[Narrator] And the teams he led were notoriously effective

in rooting out insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan

for over a decade.

In 2012, he was nominated by Barack Obama

to be the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Mike Flynn brings to this position

decades of experience in military intelligence.

His knowledge of the 21st century battlefield

is unsurpassed.

[audience applauding]

[Narrator] But three years later,

the one-time Democrat had become

an avid supporter of candidate Trump.

Lock her up, that's right.

Yeah, that's right, lock her up.

[Narrator] And would soon become

President Trump's National Security Advisor.

But just 22 days into his term,

Trump fired him for lying

about his interactions with Russia.

The evolving and eroding level of trust

as a result of this situation,

is what led the President

to ask for General Flynn's resignation.

[Narrator] And General Flynn would soon

enter a plea deal with the FBI.

His prison sentence was under review when Trump pardoned him

in December, 2020, less than a month before leaving office.

Mike Flynn and I served together for many years,

and were very close friends.

I disagree with him politically.

I am disappointed

by the nature of the comments that he makes,

the calls to action.

This is one of our top quality guns.

[all laughing]

Disgraced former General Michael Flynn, convicted felon.

He uses General like it's his first name.

I'm his Facebook friend.

His Facebook name is Gen Flynn.

On Telegram, he's General Flynn.

He's using his rank as part of his identity.

And he has adopted the radical fascist politics

of MAGA and of QAnon.

Where we go one, we go all.

Where we go one, we go all.

God bless America.

To build himself up as a leader for an insurgency

against the people of the United States.

This country is awake.

This is soil that we have fought over

and we will fight for in the future.

He could take military capabilities

and he could place 'em in those states,

and basically rerun an election in each of those states.

Clearly his military experience influences some people

to give him legitimacy that he might not otherwise have.

No reason, I mean it should happen,

No reason, that's right.

[Narrator] Flynn's apparent endorsement

of a military coup

is not the only time

the former military intelligence officer

has planted ideas about the illegitimacy

of the federal government and its partners in crime.

Well he doesn't need any introduction

on this Friday, January 28th broadcast.

He's General Flynn and of course a embattled individual

in the fight for this republic.

All these global organizations,

they see themselves as,

this is how we can control societies.

This is how we can control humanity.

So let's introduce something called COVID.

And they did it and they did it for a couple of reasons.

One of the big reasons was was to steal an election.

They have an intent to have a new world order.

They have an intent to track every single one of us.

And they use it under the skin.

They use a means by which it's under the skin.

Dr. Fauci would be right in there in the same room

with people like Dr. Mengele and Dr. Zell,

who worked for the Nazis at the time of

all of Hitler's experimentation on human beings.

The reality is, as you learn the ability to lead,

whether it's military or not,

you learn the ability to get people to do stuff.

And that's just what he's doing.

We are in a crucible moment in the history

of the United States of America.

We're fighting with faith,

we're fighting with courage,

and nothing can resist the power of prayer.

He perverts this military experience,

this religious experience

to evoke this kind of feeling of a higher purpose.

The oppression that they have used with this virus

is an abomination to freedom.

There is no righteousness on their side.

The Lord is not on their side, he is on ours.

[Audience Member] That's right.

We will not go silently in to the night.

We will fight.

We are making our lists and we are checking them twice.

And we are finding out

who is the enemy of America.

People that are creating the oppression in this country,

the people that are involved with tearing down our freedoms,

our liberties and the value

of what we hold dear in this country

need to be placed on lists.

People like Dr. Fauci that have constantly

in his life caused death,

destruction, illness, and horrible things.

They have to be put on these lists.

They have to be put out of our society all together

and never be trusted again.

Now, if someone ends up

attacking these people

that have been found to be an enemy of the United States

and they're criminals, I'm not gonna shed a tear about it.

Come here.

Good boy.

When I left the military, I was a hardcore Republican.

I was libertarian like a lot of people in the military.

I was looking at like, I can't even call 'em documentaries.

But these YouTube videos like this movie, "Zeitgeist."

You had better wake up and understand

that there are people who are guiding your life

and you don't even know it.

Now that I study extremism,

I recognize it's filled with anti-Semitic tropes.

The theme of the movie without explicitly saying it,

is that Jewish people are out there controlling the banks

and the banks are the reasons why we go into wars.

So therefore the Jews are responsible for my friends dying.

That's the connection that it's trying to make.

[Rockefeller] The ultimate goal is to get everybody

in this world chipped with an RFID chip.

And have all money be on those chips

and everything on those chips.

And if anybody wants to protest what we do,

or violate what we want, we just turn off their chip.

I just absorbed this propaganda and fell for it,

fell into it.

And I was watching Alex Jones

before anyone knew what his name was.

I mean now they're openly bragging

it's world government and they run it.

[Kristofer] Tucker Carlson when he was back on MSNBC

and Glenn Beck.

It's all connected.

These people down here are radicals.

And all of these concepts started to fit together

and feed this narrative,

this idea that I had felt

but couldn't put words to for so long,

that I was the victim, not just of circumstance,

but of some sort of nefarious group of powerful individuals

who were manipulating all of us and that everyone

was just acting as puppets.

You know what people now call the deep state,

but we were awake.

And it was our job to wake everybody else up.

Who's a patriot?

Video.

[rock music]

[Speaker] Ladies and gentlemen,

prepare for the storm [indistinct].

Yep that's.

[Speaker] Come on, come on.

There was a lot there.

They flashed photos of the pyramid on our dollar bills.

They showed a picture of George Soros.

They talked about the World Bank.

Everything's incorporated.

These are all things that I didn't understand

when I was watching my propaganda videos back in 2007, 2008.

But man, I mean,

it's like they just took notes off of the shit

that had me all confused and crazy back then.

And the second thing was my family.

These groups have always operated on a playbook

of using the prevailing social context to mobilize people,

recruit and radicalize.

The 20s Klan was anti-Black and anti-Jewish,

but it was also anti-Mexican near the border,

anti-labor in the Pacific northwest,

anti-immigrant in the northeast

where there were a lot of immigrants.

What it did was figure out

what the prevailing social tensions were

in a given community,

and use those to recruit people for its own purposes.

[explosion]

[Narrator] The prevailing feeling

among a host of veterans returning from Vietnam,

was that they had been stabbed in the back

by an ungrateful society,

their own feckless government,

and the media elite.

Well it seems now more certain than ever,

that the bloody experience of Vietnam

is to end in a stalemate.

[Narrator] It made them ripe recruits

for a new, conspiracy-fueled wave of violent extremism

aimed at rooting out the enemy within.

The Cubans are coming in by the thousands.

The Mexicans are coming in by the millions.

The the Haitians are coming in from Haiti

or wherever that little nigger country is,

coming in by the hundreds of thousands.

White people have had enough.

They can no longer even afford to buy

proper housing for themselves,

yet our government would have us spend

thousands and thousands of millions of dollars

on non-whites.

They've had enough.

One of the key figures in the white power movement

after the Vietnam War,

and one of the architects of its move

to cell style terrorism,

to using the early internet

and to a number of other major changes

that fueled its rise is a veteran named, Louis Beam.

The only thing that's important tonight,

is will America be white 100 years from tonight?

And if so,

will you commit yourself to the battle to make it so?

[Narrator] Louis Beam served two tours in Vietnam

as a helicopter gunner,

and came home in 1968 with multiple medals

for bravery in combat.

Says that I used great professional skill and courage

in the face of great personal danger.

That hasn't changed at all in my opinion.

Presently, I'm having to use utmost skill,

and I think it does take courage

to do what I'm doing,

and I'm doing it in the face of the enemy.

This time the enemy goes under a different name.

[Narrator] Beam took the skills he honed in the military

and brought them to the KKK,

where he rose to Grand Dragon of the Texas Knights.

I have been paid by the government

$300 a month to fight and kill commies,

or execute 'em, whatever term you want to use, in Vietnam.

And what is the difference between Vietnam

and Houston, Texas, but a few thousand miles?

One of the reasons that Beam

rose so quickly in these organizations,

is that he told a story about warfare and trauma

that a lot of other people were mobilized by,

including people who didn't serve.

I saw a young man about 19 years old,

entrapped in a armored personnel carrier

about 22 miles northeast of Saigon,

with his legs pinned beneath the seat

as a result of a rocket propelled grenade.

And he stayed on the radio,

kept asking for help,

asking us to

come get him.

So his argument was about the wrongness of war,

the horror of seeing casualties in the field,

the horror of losing your fellow soldiers.

But his pivot was,

this is why we should come back to the United States

and bring that violence home to everybody who left us there.

Our mission is a reconnaissance patrol.

We have information that the enemy

is in the area.

Halt.

The Jews have assumed leadership of the federal government.

They totally control it, and they're controlling us thusly.

The government that's in Washington DC today

does not represent the interest of the white people.

Therefore, we will replace them with people

who will represent the ideals

of white western Christian civilization.

How are we gonna replace them? By any means necessary.

We want the heads of the enemies in our to toe sacks.

In Vietnam, they took ears.

We're gonna take heads.

[Narrator] Beam's rhetoric and military exercises

eventually got the attention of the FBI.

And in 1983, he left Texas for Hayden Lake, Idaho,

a haven for white supremacists.

He joined forces with Aryan nations

and began to command a cell style terrorist movement

of white power activists.

The idea was that one or a few white power activists

could work together towards a commonly held

set of goals and targets,

but without prosecutable ties between them,

and without direct ties to movement leadership.

[Narrator] But there was a problem.

The cells, which were spread across the country

and into Canada,

still needed to communicate with each other.

And even when the FBI wasn't listening on their phones,

Beam wanted to do more than talk.

He wanted to share ideas and create networks.

[phone dialing]

So they created a social network called Liberty Net.

And one of the first postings was titled,

"On-Line for God and Country."

And then Louis Beam traveled around the country,

teaching people how to go online.

These message boards included assassination lists,

and ideological content and who you should hate and why.

But they also included social network content

like personal ads.

And this was in 1984-85,

way before most people think about

far right online activism.

Decades before Facebook.

[Narrator] Using this early form of the internet,

Klansman, skinheads, Neo Nazis, and other extremist groups

banded together to commit a series of heinous robberies,

bombings, and murders across the country.

And since we're all racist,

since we're all the radical right,

and that's a crime in America.

When you have to do the time, don't regret the crime.

We'll be at the forefront of the fight.

[Interviewer] Doing what?

Hopefully smashing the skulls of communists

or executing race traitors

or shooting on sight anybody we don't think is white.

We have to get our government back.

That's what it's all about.

All these so-called subversive groups

are nothing but patriotic citizens trying to do just that.

[Narrator] By 1985, the Department of Justice

came to believe that the network of white power cells

behind these crimes

represented a serious threat to national security.

Louis Beam has been charged with Seditious Conspiracy,

along with 13 other individuals.

What else is a country boy gonna do on Saturday night

when the only drugstore in town's closed?

[Narrator] But the trial

was a disaster for the government.

A stunning verdict this afternoon,

the trial of 13 white supremacists.

Among charges they faced,

conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.

The verdicts from the all white jury

came on the fourth day of deliberations.

Beam and his co-defendants were acquitted on all charges.

The humiliating outcome led the DOJ

to focus their attention on individual criminals

and abandon investigations of the white power movement

as a domestic terrorist threat.

The catastrophic legacy of leaderless resistance

has been that we as a public

have lost sight of this movement.

We don't have any domestic terrorism legislation.

We don't have domestic terrorism laws.

For example, the number one tool

FBI agents and prosecutors use

to disrupt terrorist attacks in the United States

is material support.

Material support is basically a charge to levy

on individuals who are helping a terrorist organization

or a violent organization.

Unfortunately, we don't have that

when it comes to domestic terrorist organizations.

The problem with this situation is,

when you don't have domestic terrorism laws,

you need an act to happen.

You need a hot body in order to start an investigation,

and usually you can charge that individual

with hate crime or with other charges,

but you cannot charge them with terrorism.

You cannot go after the whole network.

[News Reporter] Holy cow, about a third of the building

has been blown away, it's just devastating.

[crowd shouting]

A massive car bomb exploded

outside of a large federal building

in downtown Oklahoma City,

shattering that building, killing children,

killing federal employees, military men and civilians.

Even Timothy McVeigh,

he blew up a whole federal building,

and prosecutors could not charge

him or his associates with terrorism.

The bombing of Oklahoma City in 1995

was the largest deliberate mass casualty event

on American soil between Pearl Harbor and 9-11,

but most people still don't understand

what that event was and what it meant.

[News Reporter] The indictment charges

that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols,

former army buddies with a grudge against the government,

planned the bombing, selected the [indistinct].

McVeigh and Nichols met each other through their service.

They trained together at Fort Riley, Kansas,

before McVeigh deployed to the Gulf

as part of Big Red One Infantry Unit in Iraq.

There he seems to have experienced some amount

of traumatic combat before their return home.

After washing out of Special Forces, he was really angry,

and we see at that moment his deepening involvement

in radical white power activity.

[guns firing]

Ranging from McVeigh's connection to the Michigan militia.

The federal government itself

is the child of the armed citizen.

We, the people are the parent

of the child we call government.

In short, the federal government needs a good spanking

to make it behave.

His contact and attempted contact with groups

like the Arizona Patriots and the National Alliance,

and his written belief in white power principles

that were published in his hometown newspaper.

[Narrator] McVeigh used his military training

to help carry out the Oklahoma City bombing.

And in a letter to a friend,

he invoked his military oath to justify it.

I have sworn to uphold and defend the constitution

against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and I will.

Blood will flow in the streets.

Good versus evil.

Free men versus socialist wannabe slaves.

Pray it's not your blood, my friend.

The other key component here

was his use of "The Turner Diaries".

[Narrator] At gun shows, Timothy McVeigh

would hand out copies of "The Turner Diaries",

a dystopian novel that details

how to topple the US government.

The fictional revolutionaries start

by blowing up a federal building,

and then proceed to exterminate their political enemies,

including all Jews, Blacks, and Latinos.

"The Turner Diaries" became enormously important

to this movement, not because it's a good book,

but because it provides the imaginative answer

to a really important question,

which is how can a tiny group of people,

a small fringe movement,

do what they're setting out to do in this period,

which is to overthrow the most militarized superstate

in world history.

[Narrator] In 1997, McVeigh was convicted

of murdering 168 people,

using a weapon of mass destruction,

and blowing up a federal building.

No domestic terrorism charges were brought, however,

because he and Nichols were thought to have acted alone.

Just imagine if Timothy McVeigh's name was Mohamed.

We will look at that terrorism threat

in a very different lens.

First of all,

we will look at it as a terrorist threat.

We will go after McVeigh.

We will go after all the people who are helping him

and who are assisting him.

We will keep the investigation going

in order to get the whole network.

When you are very limited with the tools you are using,

these groups will take benefits from it.

These are not lone wolves.

These are people who are united by ideology,

by social ties, by selection of targets.

These are all part of the same movement,

and this is really what we're seeing

continuing into our present day moment.

[dark music]

Tonight, the plot to kidnap a governor foiled by the FBI.

[Narrator] In October, 2020,

less than a month before the presidential election,

14 men were arrested in a plot to kidnap

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer,

their plans included storming the state capitol,

using zip ties to take hostages,

and conducting a trial that would result

in a public hanging of the governor.

The suspects were all members of the Wolverine Watchmen,

a paramilitary group commanded by a former Marine

that had ties to the Michigan militia.

Prosecutors contend that they wanted to kidnap her

to try to ignite another American Civil War

before the 2020 election,

in hopes of disrupting it

and perhaps keeping Joe Biden from becoming president.

[Narrator] But federal prosecutors could not charge

any of the conspirators with material support.

And despite having a mountain of evidence

laid out against them at trial.

[News Reporter] The group's leader, Adam Fox,

telling the informant he was inspired

by Oklahoma City bombing terrorist, Timothy McVeigh,

telling the informant, if we can't have our world,

they can't have theirs.

Burning it down.

[Narrator] Like Louis Beam before them.

If we can't have this country, nobody gets it.

Is that clear?

There's gonna be total ashes everywhere.

[Narrator] None of the defendants

were convicted on federal charges.

The goals of this insurgency in Michigan

were to take over the State House,

and then to kidnap and execute the governor.

The goal of the insurgency on January 6th

was to overturn the results of a democratic election.

So if we see this as part of a movement,

it's to stop the American people

being able to choose their own leaders.

An insurgency is all about

seizing control of a government,

not through winning an election,

not through democratic processes, not through persuasion,

but through violence.

It's a form of war.

[Crowd] USA, USA, USA.

Fuckin coward traitor bitch!

If you look at January 6th,

what we're looking at is really the collision

of three different streams of activity.

One is the organized white power movement

that is coming off of decades, if not generations,

of organizing, armament, training, and ideological content.

They want to know what the orange hats stand for.

Fucking Proud Boys.

Another is QAnon, which is newer, more radical,

works very fast.

Where we go one, we go all.

And the final one, the biggest one,

is simply the Trump base.

[Crowd] We want Trump, we want Trump, we want Trump.

We want Trump.

[Stanley] It's clear to me that what you had

was a concerted effort by a number of different organizers.

Do you want your house back?

[crowd] Yes.

Take it.

To take these various groups together

and focus their energies and to create a critical mass.

And that's not new.

[gun firing]

Allahu Akbar.

[speaking in foreign language]

In Iraq, when Al Qaeda in Iraq emerged,

it really came led by a guy named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

He traveled around the country, had a charisma to him,

and he portrayed this,

hey, I'm not your normal political leader,

and we are going to show the kind of commitment

that real men would do.

And Al Qaeda in Iraq, which was very extreme ideologically,

started to be joined by people

who weren't natural bedfellows.

People go, finally,

someone who's not gonna put up with the crap,

someone who's going to take the law into their own hands,

and is gonna get us what we deserve,

because we have been exploited by the elites of the region.

I think Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Donald Trump

both understand that you can inflame those passions.

It is where the leader takes those frustrations

that becomes potentially disastrous.

Grievance narratives are made up.

They're constructed narratives,

but they are used by demagogues because they work.

And if you have a political party

that is organized around grievance,

around a sense of loss and a sense of threat,

you have the basis for the ideology

that will promote violence.

We're gathered together in the heart of our nation's capital

for one very, very basic and simple reason,

to save our democracy.

We're gonna walk down to the capitol.

[crowd cheering]

And we're gonna cheer on our brave senators

and congressmen and women.

And we're probably not gonna be cheering so much

for some of them,

because you'll never take back our country with weakness.

You have to show strength,

and you have to be strong.

[crowd shouting]

DC is a motherfucking war zone.

Let's go.

This is what we came for, yeah.

[Narrator] The siege of the capitol on January 6th

did not overturn the results of the 2020 election,

but that's not the only measure

by which the actions of that day are being judged.

There's footage of Proud Boys directing journalists

to read "The Turner Diaries."

Read "The Turner Diaries."

On January 6th,

"The Turner Diaries" was structuring

a lot of the imaginative, performative action of that day.

The noose hung outside the Capitol,

refers to events in "The Turner Diaries"

called The Day of the Rope,

which is the hanging of race traitors,

which include politicians.

And significantly,

there is a strike on the capitol that is not supposed to be

a mass casualty attack.

In "The Turner Diaries", it's a mortar attack.

It's meant to be simply the selected killing

of a few corrupt legislators

in order to show other white people

that extremists can strike at the heart of American power.

[rioter yelling]

- We did it. - We did it.

We fucking did it.

Yo, take laptops, paperwork, take everything.

All that shit.

And by that measure, I think that they succeeded.

Donald Trump tweeted out a video.

He said, we did a good fucking job.

January 6th was a huge success for them.

January 6th inspired so many people,

not only here in the United States, but even in Europe,

that violence is the way to change the government,

is a way to change the establishments

in the western world that they consider corrupt,

they consider evil.

They consider that these governments are nothing

but tools to the Jews

or to whatever conspiracy they believe in.

[Speaker] You believe the rich people in the world

are using this disease and exaggerating it

to create some sort of apocalyptic nightmare, right?

You think it's common sense

that we all have to stay inside and be afraid of the air?

[audience applauding]

[crowd hooting]

You look at January 6th,

I think the people that were there that participated in it,

number one, they wanted it to serve as a wake up call

to those people who are in power.

And the fact of the matter is,

every single person that was there that day

is a patriot of this nation.

[Speaker] Yo Randy, maybe you wanna put

the beers inside the fridge.

Maybe you want to get off your ass and do something.

Being a patriot, being a person that loves their country,

especially, you know, being a military veteran,

you take an oath to the Constitution.

And for a lot of those people that were there that day,

they felt that their constitution was being shredded up.

Our democracy was being shredded right in front of our eyes.

I think it's absolutely heartbreaking

to see veterans involved in these things,

and I know for a lot of them that their hearts

are in some ways in the right place,

that we just don't live in the same world of truth anymore.

The people in DC they were Americans, yeah,

and they were patriots.

They only broke laws because the DC police

didn't do their job.

[Interviewer] Okay, okay.

That's it, people died because they didn't do their job.

So they broke into the capitol

because DC police didn't do their job.

The DC police.

They didn't break into anything.

They let 'em in.

Not only did they let them in,

it's paid for by tax dollars.

It's their fucking property.

Sorry.

This is the lethal danger of the big election lie, right?

This is a conspiracy theory that says,

the very heart of American political life,

the very heart of our democracy,

has been destroyed and taken from us,

which leaves us what recourse?

Do I believe the election was stolen?

Absolutely, without a doubt.

There's no way in hell Joe Biden was elected.

81 Million votes for Joe Biden, I don't think so.

We're in a situation right now where,

we can't trust our elections anymore, we know that.

So what really is scary is, is that what will the people do?

What will the average American do when they finally wake up

to the reality of all this?

And the answer to that is, we don't know.

We have no idea what the American people will do.

This no longer is a constitutional republic,

and we are going to fight

to bring our constitutional republic back again.

We've had violent domestic extremist organizations

for a long time,

but I think what makes this moment particularly dangerous,

there are a couple of things.

The first one is the fact that it's able to ride on a wave

of conspiracy thinking,

and general distrust

that's happening because of social media technologies.

It's happening because of the way

we've structured our society on the internet,

that gives them the sheer numbers of people

that they could never dream

of bringing to bear on their own.

Everybody's gotta put their shoulder to the wheel.

We need participation 24/7.

We need you to be a force multiplier.

As a soldier and as a general,

as a retired general, we have an army of digital soldiers.

If you can do command and control over social media,

and you're fighting against evil,

and you're on the side of God,

and you're on the side of the United States and your oath,

it's a very attractive proposition.

The sad part is,

is you're using all those skills and that goodness

and that purity of heart

that you think is actually absolute unadulterated bullshit.

The second major difference

is you have political cover from the very top.

The only way we're gonna lose this election

is if the election is rigged, remember that.

January 6th was the culmination of two months

of a propagation of a big lie,

and of conspiracy theories,

by the president of the United States.

Two-thirds of house Republicans go along with Trump

and vote to overturn the electors

on the evening of January 6th.

We a United States Senator

and members of the House of Representatives

object to the counting of the electoral votes

of the state of Pennsylvania.

Madam Speaker, I rise to support the objection.

Madam Speaker, I rise to support the objection.

Madam Speaker, I rise to support the objection.

Madam Chair, I vigorously support this objection.

And I ask you.

In a vote that has always been thought to be

ceremonial and ministerial,

where you accept the electoral college results,

which were in no serious way contested.

I mean, that's almost as astounding

as what happened in terms of the insurrection.

How can so many people believe that it was unfair?

It was because their president said it was unfair.

Their senator said it was unfair.

Their member of Congress said it was unfair.

A full audit is absolutely necessary.

We should get injunctions if necessary.

And normally those are people

that the electorate can have faith in.

I rise for myself and 60 of my colleagues to object

to the counting of the electoral ballots from Arizona.

Is the objection in writing, and signed by a senator?

Yes, it is.

It is.

[Narrator] But it is not just the big lie

that appears to have captured much of the Republican party.

Congressman Denver Riggleman lost his party's nomination

over the weekend.

The first term congressman was ousted

by former Liberty University employee, Bob Good.

Getting run outta the Republican party

was really interesting.

I believe I was the first one that was affected

by Q conspiracy theories when I didn't even know it.

I had conducted a same sex wedding in summer of 2019.

Two guys who had worked for me, or volunteered.

And then I started hearing these weird things.

I'm funded by George Soros, I'm a secret Jew,

I'm a secret Dem.

I'm trying to change the sexual orientation of children.

I'm a tool of the antichrist.

And I'm hearing all this,

I'm like, this sounds like new world order, crazy stuff.

You know, the old anti-Semitic tropes.

[Speaker] You had better wake up and understand that.

Then I started doing my own research

and I'm pretty good at it.

And I saw some of the same patterns

that you saw with foreign terrorists, you know,

and when you chased ISIS or Al-Qaeda or IED resupply

from Iraq into Iran, I've seen some things.

And what I saw was that people were using language

in the open that I thought we would never see as Americans.

My two decades of intelligence,

war fighting and counter-terrorism experience,

coupled with serving in the 116th Congress,

is why I will not allow conspiracy peddlers

to hijack our ability to conduct

reasonable policy discussions

for the betterment of all Americans.

I was pretty much drummed out and censured,

for following the law and trying to save this country.

And I'm not, I don't think I'm overstating that.

[Crowd] Stop the steal, stop the steal, stop the steal.

One of our two parties is committed to

an Orwellian whitewashing of history.

If you didn't know the TV footage

was a video from January the sixth,

you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.

Is committed to propagating

or at least not quarreling with a big lie.

The big lie, the big lie is a lot of bullshit,

that's what it is.

[crowd cheering]

Is committed to not quarreling much

with conspiracy theories,

is committed to purging those Republicans

at the state and local level and at the national level

who want to fight back against the lies

and the conspiracy theories.

That's a big deal.

War is literally the continuation of politics

by other violent means.

Our military forces are the part of our society

that carries out that piece.

Then we come home, and the question is,

do we have a political system that functions?

Or are we at a point where our own politics,

the politics inside our own communities,

the politics inside our own country,

can only be continued through other means?

And we gotta be very careful,

because if you think you have support

from the highest levels of government,

why aren't you fighting for your country?

Aren't you already sort of sworn in to do this?

The issue is, is that the people

that we are identifying as extremists,

they're identifying as patriots or freedom fighters.

And that is,

it almost sounds like I'm talking about terrorism right now.

[dark music] [keyboard clicking]

One of the organizations

that I'm particularly interested in,

is the Patriot Front.

They're producing what they refer to as propaganda.

They're studying books on fascism,

because they believe democracy has failed,

and their vision for the future is a dominant white race

that has captured the Republican party

and has defeated their political opponents

by violence or by exclusion.

These guys showed up in Philadelphia

on the 4th of July, 2021 and assaulted a bunch of people.

Nothing came of it,

'cause the local cops didn't know

what the hell they were dealing with.

So this is a fascist gang

who's operating all around the country.

Police in Idaho say they prevented

a possible domestic terror attack over the weekend.

31 men were arrested, all dressed alike,

allegedly on their way to wreak havoc at a Pride event

in the city of Coeur d'Alene.

[Narrator] Coeur d'Alene is just a few miles

north of Hayden Lake,

and the Patriot Front,

following in the footsteps of Louis Beam

had made it the base of operations.

And in the same way Denver Riggleman

had been targeted by QAnon for officiating a gay wedding,

Q's rhetoric casting the LGBTQ community

as groomers and pedophiles

helped put them squarely in the sights

of the white nationalist Patriot Front.

While the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers,

the Three Percenters are a threat.

The ones that I'm really afraid of, are the Gen Z ones,

the service members who have served

during a time of relative peace.

These young people who joined to fight,

never got a chance to fight,

and who, starting in conservative echo chambers online,

have been brought into the Proud Boy to fascist pipeline.

So Gab is an alternative social media platform

that was created to be a safe space for neo-Nazis.

One of the groups on here is the National Justice Party.

This is a neo-Nazi party within the United States,

whose goal is to use protests to radicalize Trump supporters

into explicit white supremacy.

They're developing new and original propaganda

that paint them in a light of achieving

the power and the ability to shape politics,

and engage in violence in a way

that they thought they were gonna get from the military.

They understand how to recruit people into that lifestyle.

So right here, this is in Italian, "mene frego".

"I don't care".

That was the slogan of the Fascist Party under Mussolini.

So what they're trying to do is make white nationalism

look like it's a testosterone-filled way to be a man.

I believe that these young veterans who are getting out

and joining things like Patriot Front

and Nationalist Socialist Club,

and the word Nazi is nationalist-socialist.

I think that the Republican Party is

more than capable of adopting that ideology

in a way that that's unfathomable even to me.

You know, I never saw us where we are today.

I think another four years,

things could be far worse.

[dark music]

I think the worst case scenario

is probably worse than most of us want to imagine.

I could see a civil war.

Because this is the same movement

we've been dealing with this whole time,

it's reasonable to assume that what we can see

is only about half of the activity,

that there is an underground

that is mounting violent action,

training in camps,

trying to accumulate weapons and preparing for violence.

When you talk about civil war

or specific sectors of the country that could go kinetic,

just go to these areas where you see

the first big far left protests.

When Republicans take back the house, boom.

If there's anybody out there

from Antifa or Black Lives Matters,

spend your first fucking bullet at my chest, okay?

Or if Republicans think

that one of the state elections were stolen, boom.

Forget writing your legislators.

You gotta do something.

It's us, it's we the people.

You're gonna have to take my life.

There's no way, I'll die on this hill.

There's no way, no way.

All of this can happen.

Who's to say that if legislation came down

where we lost our second amendment tomorrow,

that that wouldn't start a civil war?

To be honest with you,

I don't know of any veteran that wants war in this country.

But at the very same time,

when you look back to what our founding fathers

wanted for this country,

we are so far away from that today.

It's just something they're ready for,

and their gun safe is full.

If you're prepared, you're prepared,

and if you're not, you're not.

If you're armed, then you're somewhat prepared

to defend your family and yourself.

If you're not armed, you're dog meat.

There's imminent civil war.

If we don't fix our elections

and actually make them bonafide again,

we don't have 2024.

There is no 2024.

[Narrator] But it is the election of 2024

that opens up a different front,

one that is potentially as dangerous as a violent civil war.

There are people in this movement who believe

that the nation cannot be saved as it is,

and must be overthrown

in order to make way for a white ethno-state.

And then there are probably people in this movement

who think, aha,

there's an opening here to run for office,

and mount a sort of coup from inside

in order to change the very nature of the nation.

Now, I worry about scenarios in which,

in 2024, one party controls Congress.

The other party wins a presidential election.

Congress refuses to certify the election.

The Republican party has a pretty systematic plan

to have state legislatures impose themselves

much more directly into the certification of electors,

to perhaps also suppress some democratic votes

along the way.

So I do think the chances of a real attempt

to overturn a legitimate election result are not nothing,

and they're not tiny.

And then somebody as president or people that are elected

that aren't there in a legal way.

And then that's when the dissent happens,

and that's the end of our country and our legal norms.

And that scares the hell outta me.

This country, you as individuals

with the individual liberties

and the individual rights that you have,

you need to start assuming risk

for your neighborhoods and your communities and your towns.

You have to get involved.

General Flynn's ultimate plan is to undermine democracy,

is to get his digital soldiers

to radicalize the rest of the Republican base.

Go run for dog catcher.

If you don't like this, who's running your school board?

Go run for the school board.

If you don't like who's running your little town

or your little parish, go get involved.

If Flynn can convince his followers

to push enough good people out of government,

they'll beat us into submission.

I don't want guys like

disgraced former General Michael Flynn

to be deciding who's an American and who's not.

General Flynn, do you believe

the violence on January 6th was justified?

Because their movement is about excluding others.

It's not about the will of the people.

It's about suppressing opposition.

It's about power.

General Flynn, do you believe in the peaceful transition

of power in the United States of America?

This is how countries fall apart.

Part of my experience as a veteran,

and as somebody who's worked with refugees

and done human rights work,

I know what happens when the center cannot hold

and a society falls apart.

I know what happens when your ethnic identity

or your in-group out-group membership

becomes a life and death issue,

and when neighbors start killing each other, I've seen it.

And whatever your Twitter bravado

about the next civil war is, nobody wants to see that.

That is the road to hell.

The very worst case scenario

is that we slide to authoritarianism,

that we are not able

to climb out of this.

We have seen this happen over and over and over again

in other countries.

We have seen them fight back against the first wave,

and not be ready for the second,

and not be ready for the third.

This is gonna take a long time,

and it's going to take everything we have

to make sure that our democracy

is still standing at the end of it.

I hope that people are fucking scared,

because being scared motivates people.

And I want you to be scared by what's true.

And I want you to look at evidence.

I want you to think critically,

and do everything within your power

and within the confines of the law

to make sure that we don't live

in that dystopian future,

that could just be a few years away.

I went to my son's grave site,

and I just felt so helpless.

It made me angry that my son's sacrifice

almost felt like it was in vain.

Now I've refocused and I had to take a look at it,

and I had to do a lot of soul searching

to understand that that's not the case.

And this fight is not over.

It's far from over and it may never be over.

But his sacrifice is not in vain.

My service, the service of everyone else, of all Americans,

regardless if you wore a uniform

as long as you got up in the morning,

you just tried to do the right thing.

It's not in vain.

What if every young American

did national service for a year,

maybe in uniform, but not necessarily?

What if they did it in healthcare, conservation, education,

how would they feel about each other at the end of that?

By experience we know you almost always feel different,

more tightly, you break down

many of your preconceived prejudices against other groups.

Trust starts to build.

In 2013, I first applied to my local community college.

Having had my military experience turn out so negative,

I'll be honest, my confidence was destroyed,

and I was like terrified of registering for classes,

because I was terrified of failure.

And I went over the course of my first semester

at Nassau Community College,

fulfilling a lot of bad stereotypes about veterans.

You know, coming in, having my headphones on,

having my hoodie over my head,

and just like sitting down,

not talking to anybody, not engaging.

And a group of student veterans at my community college

identified that,

recognized that it was a problem,

and helped to break me of my shell.

I went from being that guy who doesn't talk to anybody

and sits in the corner to being elected to represent

all of the student veterans at my school.

Student Veterans of Nassau is a chapter

of Student Veterans of America.

It's a national organization focused on basically

easing people into the transition

from combat to college to careers.

One of the things that the Veterans Center does,

is it allows for us to get back into an environment

that we we're familiar with.

It gives us a sense of camaraderie

that we really miss from the military.

It's not something that happened overnight,

but it set me on the path towards recovery.

And rather than feel like the future was predetermined

by these powerful groups,

and that there was nothing that I could do

to fight against them.

I started to accept the idea of

maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle.

And because most of my interactions with the outside world

were in person, person to person,

I wasn't as easily able to seek out an echo chamber

that didn't challenge my opinions,

that only reinforced my beliefs.

That diversity of opinion is what kept me from

joining the Oath Keepers when it first sprang up,

it helped to break me out of it.

A lot of veterans getting out,

they don't have that opportunity.

We're in a different world.

In this new world,

our troops have to be trained to not only defend themselves

against a Chinese sniper or a Russian tank,

but against enemy disinformation campaigns on the internet.

It's also true that disinformation

is not just coming from China and Russia.

We know how to combat malicious misinformation.

We did a pretty good job teaching soldiers and citizens

how to not fall for Nazi propaganda.

We did a pretty good job teaching soldiers and citizens

how to not fall for communist propaganda

all through the Cold War.

The problem with that, of course, is that,

opposition to the Nazis was a goal shared

by both political parties in America.

Opposition to the Soviet Union was a goal shared

by most across the political spectrum in America.

Right now, this conflict, it's far too partisan,

it's far too divisive and it's far too politicized.

We know how to do this, but it takes unity.

And this is a layer cake of problems.

This is something that does not just exist

at say DOD policy level.

This is about how journalists talk about the movement,

how our laws prosecute the movement,

how our national leaders direct their time and attention.

We know that there is a lack of political will

to establish or to create a domestic terrorism law.

Yet I think there is a big possibility

that we can designate these groups

as international terrorist organizations.

So what that means, we can take all the rules,

the laws, the authorities,

that the FBI and other law enforcement

and intelligence agencies have to go after them,

the same way we go after

international terrorist organizations.

Who's paid a price?

Who's paid a price for being

a conspiratorial irresponsible demagogic extremist?

With the exception of a few true believers

who were just duped and taken in

and foolishly believed all this stuff,

most of them are going about going along, doing fine.

Voters need to decide whether they are comfortable

with those who incite violence representing them,

and movements like this end,

when the entire population decides

that they are unacceptable.

We haven't seen that yet.

[dark music]

So the ideal solution is de-radicalization,

but that's not something I'm interested in.

I'm interested in justice,

and I'm interested in imposing costs

on people who are trying to hurt America and Americans.

All I think about all day is finding bad guys

and hoping that they end up in jail,

documenting any potentially criminal behavior,

documenting things that if they're not illegal,

society would frown upon.

And ultimately it's to put a cost behind

being an insurgent within the United States.

I'm a Nazi hunter.

But it doesn't mean we're gonna win,

and that's what I want to tell people.

Good doesn't always triumph,

but I do believe the oath means something.

And I know that I'm going directly against people

who think that they also are honoring their oath

in the same way.

And that's why I think this makes this dangerous.

But what's enabling that schism to happen,

is the lie.

Which world of truth do you live in?

It's not about commitment to country, that's shared.

So the only way to get back together,

the only possibility of reconciliation

is a conversation that can occur in an environment of truth.

We can either reconcile with with each other as a country,

or we can have a conflict.

Where do I want America to go?

Not here, not where we're at.

This path we're on will kill us.

It'll kill this country.

It'll kill freedom, it'll kill our comradery,

it'll kill our compassion

and our human decency for each other.

What I'd like to see is for the people on both sides,

all come together and agree on going by the truth only.

If we can do that, then this nation can be salvaged.

Do I see that happening?

No, I don't.

I can hope though.

[dramatic music]

[soft music]