April 13, 2016

Gawker: Friendly Fire in the American Patriot Death Cult

Everything you suspected about the Patriot gun-nuts- well odds are in your favor that you might be right.
http://gawker.com/friendly-fire-in-the-american-patriot-death-cult-1769165742

One afternoon in early January, just outside the small, north Texas town of Pottsboro, Vincent Smith shot and killed his friend, Charles Carter, who was drunk. The two were members of the American patriot movement, and they had been organizing, through Facebook, a march of gun rights evangelists on Washington. According to those who knew him, just before he was killed, Carter was expressing an interest in acquiring the makings of a bomb. The march imploded, just feet from where it began, before it ever got on the road.

Obsessed with guns-
Careless with guns-
Potential terrorists-

About three years ago, Sulser said, Carter started getting involved with a local patriot group—a branch of the Three Percenters, a paramilitary group that advocates armed resistance to gun control.

“Charles always knew he had a higher calling, but he was too old for the military. This was the next best thing,” Sulser said. “It was mostly just meetings. Weekend training exercises. Being on guard, standing up for your rights, the Constitution—stuff like that. They’re not violent. It was mostly cops, ex-military, veterans. A lot of veterans. It was a way for everyone to get in a group and have one voice.”

(The Three Percenters group, however, is decentralized and its adherents are unpredictable. Last fall, a man affiliated with the group opened fire on a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Minneapolis, wounding five. In 2011, four self-described “militiamen” were arrested and charged with planning to purchase explosives and the biological toxin ricin in a plot to attack American citizens and government officials in Atlanta, Georgia, inspired by a book written by the Three Pecenter’s founder Mike Vanderboegh, who later ridiculed their plans.)

OK...straight up terrorists-

The antigovernment agenda revolves around two separate but related policy issues: The transferral of federally-owned lands to the states (so that they might be privatized), and absolute rejection of any form of gun control. This agenda is funded and supported largely by the American Lands Council, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and a constellation of dark money groups affiliated with Charles and David Koch. (Also: the Republican National Committee.) “The links between Koch brothers’ money, private groups which advocate that states wrest public lands from the federal government, and various elected officials,” are well documented, Spencer Sunshine, an associate fellow at Political Research Associates, a think tank focused on the American conservative movement, wrote to me in an email. “But there is neither documentation that often-armed Patriot movement groups are direct recipients of Koch brothers’ money, nor that they are explicitly strategizing with right-wing land use groups like the American Lands Council or Federalism in Action.”

Sponsored by the Koch brothers of destruction as useful pawns in their pro-mining agenda-
Plausible deniability games-

People would complain loudly if the Koch Brothers were sponsoring ISIS. Instead they sponsor "ya'll qaeda" and few people complain (on the right, anyway).