Far-Right Militias Are Back

Jake Lang was arrested for his involvement in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. From prison, he has organized an armed militia that now has thousands of members nationwide. Today on WIRED Politics Lab, reporter David Gilbert explains how this new militia came to be and its possible parallels to 2020. Plus, a look into the recent resurgence of far-right extremism.

Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. David Gilbert is @DaithaiGilbert. Write to us at politicslab@WIRED.com. Also be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

Mentioned this week:
A January 6 Rioter Is Leading an Armed National Militia From Prison by David Gilbert
Extremist Militias Are Coordinating in More Than 100 Facebook Groups by Tess Owen

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Leah Feiger: Welcome to WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I'm Leah Feiger, the Senior Politics Editor at WIRED. Far-right extremists and their militias are back, and just like in 2020, they're organizing online in a very brazen way. WIRED reporter, David Gilbert has been talking to Jake Lang, one of the people charged after the January 6th Capitol riot, and while he's been incarcerated, Lang has organized a pro-gun nationwide militia on Telegram, the Encrypted Messaging Act.

Jake Lang : There is a tyrannical wave that has hit America that we've never seen before, and so it's time that people get organized in case they escalate to something that puts our very lives in danger.

Leah Feiger: So David, who is Jake Lang?

David Gilbert: So in a phone call or two phone calls I had with him from his jail cell last week, he told me that he used to be an e-commerce guy, he sold a company for a million dollars, and that he then pivoted to become a nightclub promoter in New York City, all of which we haven't really been able to verify, but then Covid hit in 2020 and there was no more nightclubs. So he had a lot more time in his hands, and like many people, he found himself deep diving down rabbit holes on the internet, and he became what he called part of the truther movement, and ultimately in later 2020, he says he got sober.

Jake Lang: I came to God, He cleaned me up. I had Jesus move into my heart, and I was baptized a couple months before January 6th and, obviously, the rest is history. I've been incarcerated since 10 days after January 6th.

Leah Feiger: Wow. OK. So from Covid to no partying to January 6th, here we go. And this guy, he got caught at January 6th for doing what exactly?

David Gilbert: So he was, according to the Department of Justice indictment that has been filed against him, he was caught on multiple videos and in photographs taking part in the riot. He was right up there at the front. He was allegedly caught on video swinging a baseball bat at Capitol Police. He was holding up a riot shield and slamming it down in front of them, and he wasn't shy about this. He posted a picture of himself in front of the Capitol on his Instagram on January 6th saying, "1776 has begun." In the days that followed this, he didn't go into hiding like a lot of January 6th attendees did. He continued to post claiming that ... He taunted the DOJ saying, "Arrest me," on one post saying that “you're on the wrong side of history," and 10 days later, there was a knock on his door and he was arrested and he's been in jail ever since. Pretty much immediately, he became this figurehead for the January 6th movement that we've seen emerged since January 6th, 2021, and he's been doing fundraising for families and other January 6th prisoners. He's been holding or organizing hunger strikes. He's also helped produce a couple of movies about January 6th, and he's co-authored a book, and he's even been hosting weekly podcasts recently, again, about January 6th. So really, his profile has skyrocketed all during his time in jail.

Leah Feiger: And now he's starting a nationwide armed militia.

David Gilbert: Yeah. For the last year, he told me he's been organizing a nationwide network of militias. He wants to create this group of 3,000 plus county level militias all across the country who will each answer up to a state leader and all the state leaders will answer up to the leadership council, which he's the head of. So he is rolling this out across the country and he hopes that it will be in place, I guess, within weeks or within months ahead of the 2024 election.

Leah Feiger: That's terrifying, and what did he say the militia plans to do? What are their goals here?

David Gilbert: Well, he said that militia doesn't really have goals.

Jake Lang: There's no goal or no end to a militia. It's a defensive structure, and any militia that has an end or a goal is improper. They're not being formed in the right spirit.

David Gilbert: And so what he thinks his militia is about is that they're going to be there, they're going to do training, and they're going to be ready to respond to emergencies. So he mentioned natural disasters like hurricanes or wildfires, that they would respond to those. He also mentioned invasion by China. He talked about the UN, he talked about federal government overreach. If they're going to take your guns from you, then the network of militias would be there to respond to these different types of emergencies, and in all cases, they would be armed. When I asked him about hurricanes or earthquakes, "Would you need to be armed?" and then he said, "Well, maybe not, but maybe you do actually need to be armed because who knows what could happen." So it's a very much a pro-gun, Second Amendment group being armed is a key part of how they see themselves. The last thing that he mentioned that they were kind of going to be organizing around was the elections in 2024 when they said that potential civil unrest is what they will be preparing for the November vote.

Leah Feiger: Launching five months ahead of the elections. That's wow.

David Gilbert: Yeah, the timing is troubling.

Leah Feiger: I mean, this is wild to have a national armed militia in all 50 states county by county. How is Lang able to organize people from inside prison?

David Gilbert: Yeah, it's incredible because when I initially contacted him, I didn't actually realize that he was still in prison. I believed he was out on bail, but he was in prison. So he very quickly responded to me on X or Twitter, and as I said, I spoke to him over the phone. All of this is being organized via Telegram. There are already 50 state level state-specific groups on Telegram where people who are interested in joining can sign up. They will then be vetted by a state level leader. Not all state level leaders have been appointed yet, but some have. We know who some of them are, and the vetting process is apparently a five-minute FaceTime call where they will look through your social media history and get you to verify your identity and say that you are who you say you are. Now, I've been a member of at least three, if not four of those state level groups for-

Leah Feiger: This is where David admits that he's actually joined a bunch of nationwide militias in the United States, "I've been a member of three, four."

David Gilbert: It's for journalism, Leah. It's okay. So I've been a member of three or four of these state level groups for about a week or so now and haven't received a direct message from any of them asking me to set up a FaceTime call or for the vetting process to start. I know some researchers who are also in these groups, none of them, as far as I know, have been contacted either. So the claims that they're making about the vetting process and how it's already happening and it's rolling out haven't been shown to be true yet and seem to be a bit overblown.

Leah Feiger: So what's going on with Lang's legal case, and given what he's in prison for, why is any of this allowed?

David Gilbert: So right now, he's got a trial date set for September the 9th, but as I said earlier, he's waiting on a Supreme Court ruling on one of the accounts in his indictment, which is for corruptly obstructing an official proceeding, a charge that brings with it a 20-year sentence, and it's a charge that many the J6 prisoners have against them, and indeed, Donald Trump, his criminal case being brought by the special counsel, Jack Smith, is facing a similar charge.

Jake Lang: So if Supreme Court tosses this charge, it could be one of the greatest upheavals in black eyes in the DOJs history, and it'll save me and all my brothers from a lot of prison time and also Donald Trump.

David Gilbert: So there's a lot hanging on that Supreme Court decision because it will make a major impact on how long Lang gets to spend in prison. Why is he allowed to organize a militia from behind bars? It's unclear. He claims on X that he's had his cellphone taken off him now, but it showed over the last three or four years that he's been able to continue to be a figurehead or a leader of this movement despite the fact that he's been incarcerated.

Leah Feiger: Got it, and obviously, he's not doing this alone. Talk to us about some of the other people involved in this group. It's a real who's who conspiracy cast of characters assembled, the conspiracy Avengers, if you will.

David Gilbert: Yeah, I suppose because he's become this kind of figurehead over the last couple of years. So he's got a list on his website, this leadership council. The chairman of the group is Ann Vandersteel, who is a well-known political commentator, but also a Qanon conspiracist. He's got Stew Peters as listed as his communications director. And Stew Peters has become one of the most prominent conspiracy theorists in the US in recent years beginning with Covid, and he's also got Couy Griffin, who is the founder of the Cowboys for Trump, who in 2022 refused to certify a primary election result in New Mexico and he was a commissioner there. So he's been able to amass this leadership council of people who are very well-known within this world and hold a lot of sway and are therefore primed and ready to push his message out there. Though to be fair, so far, they haven't been pushing it too much. There has been messages and posts here and there, but there hasn't been a real concerted effort yet by these people to get people to sign up to the network.

Leah Feiger: Well, I guess that brings me to my next question, which is a lot of people are going to dismiss what Lang is doing as a lot of attention seeking, fitting in with some of his previous behaviors and a bit of bluffing. Is that fair or is this really something we should be pretty concerned about?

David Gilbert: I think it's both. I think it is absolutely fair to say that some of the stuff that he says is just hyperbole and it's just overblown and he's just trying to get attention. Like on his website and in his conversation with me, he said that the network has 20,000 members already, and that was a week after it had launched. That is just not true because we went through the Telegram channels and there's maybe 14, 15,000 members there, but experts have gone through it as well and looked at it more closely, and they have universally said the numbers are artificially inflated and that the real number of members is about 2,500.

Leah Feiger: To be fair, a militia of 2,500 across the United States that's carefully organized on Telegram and promotes the use of armed weapons as a response to anything from natural disasters to fake claims of election fraud is still really concerning. I'm concerned.

David Gilbert: Absolutely, and I think that gets lost. When you write articles like these, a lot of people kind of say, "Oh, you shouldn't be platforming these people. They're making this up. They're bluffing."

Leah Feiger: Definitely.

David Gilbert: But there are people in these Telegram groups who want to join armed militias, and it's part of a bigger resurgence in far-right paramilitary activity and discussions that me and other experts are seeing online in recent weeks and months, and that's really disturbing.

Leah Feiger: We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about how all of these kinds of militias are starting to go mainstream again and what this means for 2024.Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. David, you were talking about how militias are having a resurgence right now. What exactly do you mean by that?

David Gilbert: What I mean is that Lang is, and his network of militias that they've launched is just one part of a broader movement that both I, other journalists and researchers who are monitoring the space have seen in recent weeks, and it's all linked to the 2024 election, that people need to be ready to respond if something happens and, of course, what that if is is if Donald Trump loses.

Leah Feiger: So what does Lang say will happen in the event that Donald Trump loses?

David Gilbert: Well, Lang talks about civil unrest, and that if Trump loses, that people will automatically be outraged. Do you believe that the outcome was accurate that Joe Biden did win the election?

Jake Lang: No, I think it's pretty much a statistical outlier or an impossibility.

David Gilbert: When I spoke to him, he reeled off a list of the most widely known election conspiracies from 2020.

Jake Lang: Rigged, stolen, manipulated, scam, whatever you want to call it. It was not the will of the people.

David Gilbert: When he looks forward to 2024, he is predicting that if Trump loses, there will be a major catastrophe and there will be a lot of people angry, and that's where his militias is going to be ready to step in.

Leah Feiger: Is this real? I mean, people say a lot of things online. What kind of connections are you and other researchers drawing between this moment in 2020?

David Gilbert: The network of people who are organizing this is much greater and much stronger because they have had four years to create these nationwide networks of connections and groups, whether it's online or in-person. We saw ahead of 2020 that there were some researchers and some journalists who were raising flags, not a lot, but they were raising flags and saying, "This is worrying." The intelligence services were also noticing that this was happening, but no one took any action. I think that this time around, we're about five months out from the election, I think that the signals are much stronger. In recent weeks, I have definitely noticed a serious uptick in people who are discussing things like militias, things like sheriffs' posses, that people need to be ready for 2024, this idea that something is going to happen on November 5th if the result doesn't go the way people think it will go. So I think that that's the parallels that you see between 2020 is that people ignored what was there in front of them. In 2020, you could kind of see why that happened because something like January 6th had never happened before. So what is happening this time is much bigger, but people at the moment, at least, don't seem to be paying attention.

Leah Feiger: Yeah, I mean, that's fair. I'm generally not seeing a ton of reporting or coverage on this rising far-right activity. Why exactly is that?

David Gilbert: It's the kind of boiling frogs analogy where the temperature has been raised so much over the last four years by Trump and his allies in the Republican party who have normalized wild conspiracies, hate speech, and just a general sense of chaos that people have become so used to this kind of stuff happening. For example, recently, a piece we ran on WIRED talked about how extremist groups like the Three Percenters, which is another armed militia group, are now openly recruiting for members on Facebook. It's as if people have just forgotten what has happened over the last couple of years and they're just returning to what they were doing pre-2020. The FBI has also arrested a number of people in recent weeks in relation to potential mass shootings. In one case, the man that they arrested claimed that he was going to start a race war by shooting Black people ahead of the 2024 election. He specifically mentioned the 2024 election. So there are people out there who are willing, it seems, to go that extra mile, and even if someone like Jake Lang is being accused of bluster and hyperbole, he's speaking to a lot of people through his network who are ready to hear what he has to say and could take things to the next level.

Jake Lang: And civil unrest at any given moment, especially around an election time, it is something that could come along, and so we have to plan for that contingency as well. Yes.

Leah Feiger: Who else besides Lang, in these examples that you're bringing up, who else is talking about this and where are they talking about this?

David Gilbert: So if you monitor Telegram channels and the kind of pro-Trump message boards and on X, on Twitter, which has lost all semblance of moderation or-

Leah Feiger: Yes, no content moderation for a neo-Nazi to be found. Cannot toss a stone.

David Gilbert: So I was in a Telegram channel this morning looking at people talking about militias, and what they're discussing is not should or shouldn't we have a militia, it's how we should refer to it so that we can make it sound better. So they were talking, "Should we call it Peace Officers Association?"

Leah Feiger: It's a bit of a rebrand here. We're making militias palatable for everyone, including your suburban mom next door.

David Gilbert: Exactly.

Leah Feiger: I want to talk about the role that politicians have played in getting us to this point. How are they responding to it or even tech platforms where these militias are organizing?

David Gilbert: I don't see much in the way of politicians making statements about this. I don't see tech platforms taking any stance on this, really, beyond when it's pointed out to them by journalists that this may be in breach of their guidelines. X, in particular, is absolutely doing nothing. Jake Lang is posting on X pretty much every day or at least someone connected to him is posting on X every single day and has a huge following there. Telegram, where a lot of this stuff is being organized, got zero moderation and has had zero moderation for a long time, only really takes action when governments step in and tells them to take down certain channels or if tech companies like Apple and Google do. So there just at the moment does not seem to be much of a coordinated efforts to try and stop what is happening, and whether that's because people believe that what's happening is just being overblown or they're just not aware of it or they're ignoring it is hard to say.

Leah Feiger: How have Trump and his allies contributed to where we are with this conversation about militias and the growth of militias right now?

David Gilbert: What Trump does best is that he takes the lead from what everyone else is saying. So for now, he's not talking about militias openly, although he has during his time as president, he became very close with sheriffs across the country, especially more right-wing sheriffs, and he has long been on the side of law enforcement, especially law enforcement who are willing to kind of go that extra mile. So he's not specifically talking about militias, but the people in his circle are beginning to talk about it now, and it is kind of being circulated more and more as this idea that having an armed militia in your county is something that is fine. There is no problem with it. Everyone references the fact that militias are mentioned in the Constitution and that therefore you can't really question it, and if you question it, you're unpatriotic. So it's nothing new, but this time around, the networked and the coordinated effort that seems to be in place now to create nationwide militias is definitely something new.

Leah Feiger: A lot to think about in the next five months. We'll be right back with Conspiracy of the Week. Welcome back to Conspiracy of the Week, arguably my favorite section of the podcast where our guests will bring us conspiracies and then I'm going to vote on the winner, but today, David is our only guest, so I'm also going to give my favorite conspiracy of the week. David, will you be able to beat me? Time will tell. What do you have for us?

David Gilbert: I'm backed with a Kate Middleton conspiracy, which I know you like.

Leah Feiger: Oh, no, I do like those. OK, hit me. What do we got? What do we got?

David Gilbert: I'll do that with a Kate Middleton one. So obviously, for anyone who's been in a cave for the last six months, Kate Middleton went missing from public view for a while, and everyone lost their heads and thought she was dead or was an alien or something. Then she reemerged with a video and she sadly told everyone that she had cancer and she was dealing with it, and that dispelled most of the conspiracies, not all of them. People said it was AI, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So last week, Prince William, it was revealed that he had a secret meeting with MI6. So that kind of made people lose their minds all over again, but on top of that, we saw Kate Middleton reappear on Sunday, I think it was, or Saturday at the trooping of the colors, and people connected those two things. Then on Sunday, on Father's Day, Prince William posted a picture of himself with his three kids looking on a beach, looking into the sea with their backs to everyone so you couldn't see their faces. So putting all of those together, people obviously think that this is signs that something major is about to happen. The MI6 meeting was apparently about how William is going to divorce Kate and make it not a international incident. The picture of William facing the sea was apparently a picture that you would post if you were remembering someone. So that suggested to a lot of people that Kate Middleton was already dead, and this was an in memorandum post by Prince William, even though apparently Kate Middleton took the picture.

Leah Feiger: Incredible. I love all of that so much. Glad that there is a second saga that can delight us. Yeah, good. Good, good, good,

David Gilbert: Yeah, it's never ending.

Leah Feiger: Never ending. OK. So that's pretty good, to be fair. Mine is, because how could it not be, about Alex Jones.

David Gilbert: Great.

Leah Feiger: I mean, truly, the conspiracist of conspiracist faced a bankruptcy hearing last week where the judge actually issued a split ruling. He said that Jones can follow through with the plan that his attorneys had requested, and he's going to have to liquidate most of his assets to pay the nearly $1.5 billion that he owes to the families of children from the Sandy Hook shooting, but he's not going to have to liquidate Infowars. So this conspiracist channel, Infowars, gets to live another day, but Jones has decided, and this is my conspiracy, Jones has decided that this entire attempt to take him and Infowars down is obviously a globalist conspiracy.

David Gilbert: Of course, it is.

Leah Feiger: It didn't work. One of his lines during his stream over the last couple of days was, "It's almost like God is really being entertained by this and just wants to see the fight continue."

David Gilbert: So in that case, is God on his side? Is that what he's saying?

Leah Feiger: It seems like it, it seems like it, although I will say that the streams have gotten so much more deranged that it was a little bit hard to even pull out really anything of meaning except for the fact that this is a takeover attempt.

David Gilbert: Great conspiracy.

Leah Feiger: Thank you. I came into this pretty sure that I was going to give myself the win, but I love a Kate Middleton conspiracy, so I'm going to go for a tie here.

David Gilbert: Oh, OK.

Leah Feiger: Congrats, David.

David Gilbert: I'll take it. I'll take it.

Leah Feiger: David, thank you so much for joining us this week.

David Gilbert: It was my pleasure.

Leah Feiger: Listeners, do you have any fun conspiracy theories, ideally ones that you don't personally believe in? Email us at politicslab@WIRED.com. Thanks for listening to WIRED Politics Lab. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow the show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. We also have a newsletter, which Makena Kelly writes each week. The link to the newsletter and the WIRED reporting we mentioned today are in the show notes. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper. Pran Bandi is our engineer. Amar Lal mixed this episode. Stephanie Kariuki is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is Global Head of Audio at Condé Nast, and I'm your host, Leah Feiger. We'll be back in your feeds with a new episode next week.