Audio excerpt — Capitol rioters:

“USA! USA!”

Audio excerpt — Unidentified man:

“We have a breach of the capitol, breach of the capitol.”

JOSH:

I covered January 6th as an investigative reporter.

Audio excerpt — Capitol rioters:

“Drag em out.”

JOSH:

A lot of people remember the images of violence against police officers outside the Capitol and people, you know, rummaging through desks.

Audio excerpt — Capitol rioters:

“Break it down.”

JOSH:

But it's easy to forget how much worse it could've been. You know, this mob got within 100 ft of Vice President Mike Pence, who they'd been saying they want to hang for treason.

I was always struck by this kind of feeling that there was a lot of things I didn't think the public got much of a chance to see. And just have, kind of ,ever since wondered, where does the militia movement go from here after this kind of huge, calamitous event? You know, are we going to look back at January 6th as the peak of militia violence in America, or is it just the prelude to something even more consequential?

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RUBY:

Josh Kaplan is an investigative reporter at ProPublica.

After January 6, he didn’t just wonder what would happen next for the militia movement, he decided to find out.

He gained access to hundreds of thousands of internal messages sent by the shadowy militia group AP3, or American Patriot Three Percenters.

These messages tell the story of AP3 from the ashes of January 6 to their transformation into one of the biggest armed right wing militias in the United States.

Now, AP3 is gearing up for the November election and Josh has uncovered a picture of what could happen next.

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

Today, Josh Kaplan on the Three Percenters – their politics and their plans.

It’s Monday, September 16.

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RUBY:

So, Josh, I thought we could go right back to the very beginning of your interest in this. Can you take me into your reporting and tell me about the kind of picture that you started to form of AP3 and their ideology?

JOSH:

Yeah, I mean, the Three Percenters take their name from the claim that only 3 per cent of Americans fought in the American Revolution. So it's organised around this idea that, you know, a very small vanguard can with concerted action, stand up against what they see as tyranny. And one of the chief activities this group has is very serious paramilitary training. Getting together with guns and practising, storming buildings with semi-automatic rifles, attacking dummies with knives. But there are all these strange things about the groups that I found surprising. They do charity drives for the homeless, they celebrate Valentine's Day together, they have a monthly magazine with kids games in the back. And the leader of the group, Scot Seddon, he's kind of a surprising figure to lead a major paramilitary group.

Audio excerpt — Scot Seddon:

“Good morning guys. Just want to wish everybody a very safe, happy, healthy Thanksgiving holiday.”

JOSH:

He's a former army reservist but also, you know, spent most of his adult life bouncing between jobs. He worked as the manager for a small-time rapper. He worked as a model and appeared on the cover of erotic books.

Audio excerpt — Scot Seddon:

“We're a conservative, American law abiding group. We believe in constitutional law enforcement.”

JOSH:

It started on basically just an idea on Facebook, and before long there were several thousand people that span active duty law enforcement, active duty military, alongside convicted criminals, small business owners, health care professionals. But broadly, they see themselves as the last line of defence against the excesses of the government and the left.

Audio excerpt — Scot Seddon:

“They're going to find out who has not gotten their vaccine, who has an American flag out in the front of their home, who is a conservative, who is a conservative gun owner. They're going to feel you out. Trust me.”

JOSH:

If you take a lot of what Donald Trump is saying literally, and we're in a situation where America has been taken over in a vast conspiracy, the authorities are either asleep at the wheels or in on it and they are coming for you. It's the exact sort of thing that they feel like they need to step into. No one else is going to do anything so these brave men and their guns are going to make a difference.

RUBY:

Right, and Josh, the militia movement didn’t start with Donald Trump. So, where does something like AP3 come from and how has it evolved?

JOSH:

So the modern militia movement in the US started in the early 90s, really around issues of gun control and it was expanding rapidly. And then in 1995, a military veteran with militia ties blew up a government building in Oklahoma City and killed almost 200 people, which was, at the time, the largest terrorist attack ever on American soil.

Audio excerpt — News reporter:

“Timothy McVeigh. Guilty. Guilty of murder. Guilty of conspiracy. Guilty on all 11 federal charges that he faced in the Oklahoma City bombing trial.”

JOSH:

And that kind of killed the movement in the US for a long time. But then in 2008, you have Obama’s election, who is portrayed by much of conservative media as this undercover Marxist, as a secret Muslim.

Audio excerpt — Unidentified woman 1:

“Obama and his wife, I'm concerned they could be anti-white, that he might hide that.”

Audio excerpt — Unidentified woman 1:

“He’s not a Christian! This is a Christian nation! What is our country gonna end up like?”

JOSH:

And you also have a financial crisis. Those two factors kind of rekindled this new generation of groups. So AP3 and other Three Percenters groups started at that time, the Oath Keepers, who became very famous for their role in the Capitol riot, became very big national militias in the US.

Audio excerpt — News reporter:

“The events in Washington have taken a violent and tumultuous turn in the past few hours, as thousands of supporters of President Trump storm the US capitol building, venting their anger at the victory of Joe Biden in the presidential election.”

JOSH:

The people involved in the January 6th riots, or who are associated with the January 6th riots, in the weeks after there were pariahs. Groups like AP3 and other groups like it were just haemorrhaging members. And they, you know, their leaders were talking internally that we may not survive this, this may be the end of our movement. It was a time of real strife and depression for this wing of the far right.

RUBY:

So what changed?

JOSH:

One, there was a shift in the political climate that none of them expected, where Trump and other prominent figures in the Republican Party, embracing the January 6th rioters as patriots.

Audio excerpt — Trump:

“They were there with love in their heart. That was an unbelievable and it was a beautiful day.”

JOSH:

And you started having people actually join saying, I was inspired by January 6th and they were able to have really pretty massive success recruiting through Facebook again, with as many as 50 people applying every day to join. It doesn't take very long for that to, you know, become a really large number.

They've already tried to shape American life through armed vigilante operations. And they've been roiled by this passionate, intensifying schism over the question of if and when they should commit mass political violence.

RUBY:

After the break, the actions AP3 are already taking and what will happen should Trump lose.

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RUBY:

So Josh, AP3 started to grow again after January 6. They went from being shunned in the immediate aftermath of that day, to having people line up to join them. So, can you tell me what you’ve learned about what they’ve been doing with their reinvigorated membership?

JOSH:

Yeah, I mean, these are people that regularly put themselves into really volatile situations while heavily armed, and so they have a lot of tactics from staging a counter-protest of a defund the police rally with the explicit purpose of building ties with police. They talk about getting intelligence from them and actually being asked by police to assist them in operations. They were assaulting Black Lives Matter protesters and rounding up migrants to the US-Mexico border, doing these armed vigilante patrols, where they would catch migrants and at gunpoint, stop them and to pass them along to law enforcement.

Audio excerpt — Three Percenter:

“Okay, guys, American Patriots Three Percent. We are here, we are on the border, as we said we would be. We arrived earlier today.”

JOSH:

And then in the 2022 midterm elections, Scott Seddon kind of put out a call to arms that they were going to stake out ballot boxes where people can drop off absentee ballots and try to intimidate people that they believed might be trying to commit fraud. But it very quickly went wrong, because one of their members was standing outside a ballot box in Arizona with a handgun on his chest in full tactical gear, and he got into a confrontation with a woman. Law enforcement arrived at the scene and this quickly blew up and became a huge national story.

Audio excerpt — News reporter:

“Officials in Arizona are now stepping up security after describing instances in which vigilantes, their word, were seen loitering around ballot boxes.”

JOSH:

As soon as this guy was in the news, he quit the group in order to protect them. And so anyone reading about this at the time, and for many months later, would just think, oh, this is a lone wolf, rather than a fairly carefully organised vigilante operation from a militia.

RUBY:

Okay. And so as that's happened, and as we've moved closer and closer to election day, what are we hearing from the group's founder, from Seddon?

JOSH:

He's been going through some difficulties with the group. As I said, he was an Army reservist, but he presented himself as much more than that. You know, he said on a public resume that he was a veteran of the Gulf War. This is something he leaned on to get authority within the group, to get people to follow him. And eventually one of his own members got their hands on his discharge papers and, according to his military discharge papers, he was active duty for five months and that consisted of initial training. That caused an explosion internally, of people who felt they'd been lied to. And then a rumour started to spread that he was under investigation for fraud and that led to a bunch of people leaving the group and joining other militias. So broadly, the movement has gotten more fractured and more decentralised. And that means that it could be much harder for law enforcement to track these groups and to intervene before one can commit violence.

RUBY:

So can we talk about the upcoming election? We're seeing signs already that Trump, should he lose, might not concede defeat.

Audio excerpt — Trump:

“I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election, if I win.”

RUBY:

He’s alluded to a bloodbath.

Audio excerpt — Trump:

“If I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole... That's going to be the least of it. It's going to be a bloodbath for the country.”

RUBY:

How do comments like that get interpreted by AP3 members, and what are they actually saying about their intentions for the upcoming election?

JOSH:

I think that's the really crucial question behind all of this. Just to give a taste of this, how they're thinking about this in AP3, they’re sure it's going to be stolen again. One leader wrote that this election’s not going to be decided at the ballot box, it's going to be decided at the ammo box. And If you look at, you know, the polling numbers even of how Americans are viewing political violence, support for political violence seems to only be growing. And these groups haven't gone away, they’ve gotten smarter. And, you know, if AP3 is any example, they’ve gotten angrier.

And I think the things that experts are most fearful of is if Trump fulfils the promise he's made repeatedly, that if he wins, he will pardon January 6 defendants. They fear that, you know, whatever his intention is, people on the most extreme side of the Republican Party could take it as a get out of jail free card for committing violence for the cause.

RUBY:

Well Josh, thank you so much for your time today. It's been really interesting.

JOSH:

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today...

Former top public servant Kathryn Campbell says she is a “scapegoat”, after an independent review found her to have breached the public service code of conduct in relation to her handling of the illegal Robodebt Scheme.

Ms Campbell is among 12 current and former public servants who have been found to have breached their obligations 97 times, according to the Australian Public Service Commission review.

And,

Voters in New South Wales will wait several weeks to find out the official results of the council elections held over the weekend.

It’s been an unusual election, marked by the NSW Liberal Party accidentally failing to nominate more than 136 counsellors across 16 different council areas.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. Thanks for listening.

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