Standing in the North Carolina woods, Chris Arthur warned about a coming civil war. Videos he posted publicly on YouTube bore titles such as “The End of America or the Next Revolutionary War.” In his telling, the U.S. was falling into chaos and there would be only one way to survive: kill or be killed.
Arthur was posting during a surge of far-right extremism in the years leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He wrote warcraft training manuals to help others organize their own militias. And he offered sessions at his farm in Mount Olive, North Carolina, that taught how to kidnap and attack public officials, use snipers and explosives and design a “fatal funnel” booby trap to inflict mass casualties.
While he continued to post publicly, military and law enforcement ignored more than a dozen warnings phoned in by Arthur’s wife’s ex-husband about Arthur’s increasingly violent rhetoric and calls for the murder of police officers. This failure by the Guard, FBI and others to act allowed Arthur to continue to manufacture and store explosives around young children and train another extremist who would attack police officers in New York state and lead them on a wild, two-hour chase and gun battle.
Arthur isn’t an anomaly. He is among more than 480 people with a military background accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes from 2017 through 2023, including the more than 230 arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Bolding added, archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/OOU0a
e; added a final period to the AP’s headline because it looks weird without one
As a veteran disillusioned with the American government, I could see myself being radicalized. I could never see myself siding with criminals, rapists, and/or fascists though. wtf is up with people believing they’ve fought for freedom and prosperity and then doing the opposite?
Because they want freedom for themselves but not for the “lessers”
If you’re the hero, then everyone who isn’t vocally on your side is the
recentenemy.Edit: “Recent”? Goddamned autocorrect.
What?
You asked why they’re basically attacking what they were supposed to defend.
They consider themselves heroes. They need to be heroes because otherwise they’re nothing. And heroes need villains to fight. If you’re not hailing them as one of the heroes, then obviously you’re one of the villains. It’s standard Sith absolutes.
(Edit: I see the word substitution that turned my reply to nonsense now. Ugh, sorry… :) )
Because the best explanation I’ve encountered for conservative-minded logic is “I get to tell you what to do but you don’t get to tell me what to do.”