Where the Far Right Goes After January 6
BY TALIA LAVIN
Two weeks before the 2020 presidential election vote, I joined a militia. The Georgia III% Security Force, an offshoot of the national Three Percenters militia—named after an apocryphal statistic that only 3% of American colonists took up arms against the British during the American Revolution—hosted its communications on the walkie-talkie app Zello, and they were open to new members. In the heated weeks immediately preceding the election, the “interview channel,” which vetted new recruits, started to buzz nightly; the group swelled to some 81 people.
I invented a new identity, with a white-sounding name and a higher-pitched, Southern-inflected voice, and passed an hour-long voice interview, in which I detailed the contents of my bug-out bag; what I might do if I encountered armed Antifa members; whether I was ready to give up my family if everything went to hell; what guns and weapons I had in my possession; and whether I had ever been a member of the armed forces or the police. I tried not to let my voice shake and chalked up the gaps in my gun knowledge to being “newly awakened” to the urgency of the political situation in the United States. The men and women interviewing me accepted this explanation without question.
I did this as part of a project called Deplatform Hate, which began as a network of activists and researchers monitoring the far-right sphere for potential violence around the election and has since turned into a nonprofit seeking to purge hate groups from the internet. As I dropped in on the Security Force’s Zello channel during nightly check-ins and all-day shooting-the-breeze sessions, the tenor of conversation, never particularly relaxed, ratcheted up to the apocalyptic as the election approached.
https://www.gq.com/story/capitol-riot-and-where-the-far-right-goes-now
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