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How Armed Protests Are Creating a New Kind of Politics

Gun rights protesters at the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond on Jan. 20, 2020.

Light Foot Militia members marching in Richmond on Jan. 20, 2020.

Mike Dunn of the Free Sons of Liberty militia talking to news reporters in Richmond on Jan. 18, 2021.

A demonstrator at a gun rights rally in Richmond on July 4, 2020.

Militia members protesting in Richmond on Jan. 20, 2020.

A muster call to sign up new militia members in Campbell County, Virginia, on Feb. 29, 2020.

Members of the Halifax Militia training in Virginia on June 6, 2020.

At the Halifax Militia training on June 6, 2020.

Mike Dunn at the Halifax Militia training on June 6, 2020.

Members of the Boogaloo movement at a gun rights rally in Richmond on July 4, 2020.

Members of the Last Sons of Liberty militia in Richmond on Jan. 18, 2021.

Members of the Last Sons of Liberty militia getting ready in their hotel room outside Richmond on Jan. 18, 2021.

Mike Dunn’s gear, before the rally on Jan. 18, 2021.

In Richmond on Jan. 18, 2021.

In Richmond on Jan. 18, 2021.

Last year, thousands massed at Virginia’s Capitol to protest against new gun-control laws.

They included heavily armed militia members, an increasingly common presence in American political life.

This year, after the failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, these displays look very different — but the message is the same.

Out of the Barrel of a Gun There are 400 million privately owned guns in America, by some estimates, and on Jan. 20, 2020, some 22,000 of their owners arrived at the State Capitol of Virginia, a neoclassical building designed by Thomas Jefferson that sits on a rolling lawn in the hilly center of downtown Richmond. The occasion was Lobby Day, a recent tradition in Virginia, held annually on Martin Luther King’s Birthday, on which citizen groups come to the Capitol to directly air their concerns to their representatives in the State Legislature. The concerns of the gun owners, who were assembled by an organization called the Virginia Citizens Defense League, were in one sense specific: They were protesting a raft of firearms-related bills the Legislature’s new Democratic majority was taking up that would tighten the state’s generally permissive gun laws. Seventy-eight counties in the state, making up the near-entirety of its rural areas, had declared themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries,” according to the V.C.D.L.

This was enough to attract the attention of the Oath Keepers, a national militia group that draws its membership from current and former military, law-enforcement personnel and first responders. In December 2019, the Oath Keepers issued a statement calling for “boots on the ground” in Virginia, accusing Gov. Ralph Northam and “oath-breaking politicians in the State Legislature” of violating the Second Amendment and warning of the prospect of his deploying the state’s National Guard against the sanctuary counties. Stewart Rhodes, the group’s founder, vowed “an ongoing campaign/deployment,” assisting sheriffs in the state’s dissenting counties in forming officially recognized local militias, directly lobbying military and law-enforcement members to refuse Northam’s orders and providing tactical training to “EVERYONE in the county who is loyal to the Constitution.”

As Lobby Day approached, federal agents arrested three men suspected of ties to the Base, a white-supremacist group, who said they were amassing weapons ahead of the rally. Northam, citing intelligence that “suggests militia groups and hate groups, some from out of state, plan to come to the Capitol to disrupt our democratic process with acts of violence,” declared a state of emergency, including a temporary ban on weapons in Capitol Square. The Virginia Citizens Defense League’s president, Philip Van Cleave, told The Washington Post that he hoped it would not become “another Charlottesville” — the 2017 white-supremacist rally that left one counterprotester dead — suggesting poor police and state planning was to blame for what had transpired there. He told militia members they were not needed to provide security; after all, he told The Post, the rally would be not only heavily policed but also attended by “enough citizens armed with handguns to take over a modern midsized country.”

Still, Van Cleave did not dissuade the militia members from attending, and they did, by the thousands. They threaded through the crowds on Ninth Street, along the Capitol grounds, wearing tactical gear and carrying AR-15-style rifles. The scene was dreamlike, the kind of thing that seemed at once impossible in America and only possible in America, the only country in the world that allowed private citizens to amass military-style weapons in such astounding quantities while also reassuring itself that such an arsenal would never prove politically consequential.

“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” Mao Zedong observed in 1938. Americans, by contrast, have generally whistled past the full implications of their own privately held arsenal, treating guns as an object of politics, not a subject. This is partly a function of the country’s until recently unbroken modern record of peaceful transfers of power. It is also a triumph of Second Amendment activists’ messaging and their ability to successfully navigate that message’s central paradox: that the right to bear arms is constitutionally guaranteed because of the potential need to overthrow the same government that codifies the right in the first place. Gun rights advocates have done this mostly by confining their language with monotonous discipline to the fact and mythology of the Revolutionary War, associating gun rights with heroism and patriotism while also implicitly assuring that their exercise against the state is a matter of deep history. George Washington knew what Mao knew, of course, but his own revolution was an awfully long time ago.

The militia movement — which flowered in the 1990s and began to resurge amid a general rise in white-nationalist and antigovernment activity during Barack Obama’s presidency — has always challenged the niceties of gun rights rhetoric. Militias have stubbornly insisted that the government’s tyranny and their rebellion against it are not theoretical but real, that politics can and should be pursued not just on behalf of guns but by way of them. Nevertheless, in their ’90s heyday it was possible to see them as an eccentric, if occasionally violent, curiosity — especially for liberals ensconced in cities and suburbs that, outside the Pacific Northwest, were mostly far removed from the prominent theaters of militia activity. “To a Bostonian, they are a remote irritation with no visible impact on mainstream media, culture or politics,” the Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby told the journalist David A. Neiwert in “In God’s Country,” his 1999 book about the militia movement.

The militias’ massed appearance at last year’s Lobby Day, a large-scale muster in a midsize city not far off the Acela corridor, was in this way a revelation. It was also the logical product of a decade in which the boundaries between the mainstream and the fringe had collapsed within both the gun rights movement and the Republican Party, at the same time the boundaries between the movement and the party had themselves collapsed. Though nonviolent, it was not so much a demonstration in the usual sense as it was an unsubtle show of force. The military-style rifles paraded alongside banners for Donald Trump — a president who would soon be intimating his intentions to reject an unfriendly outcome of the presidential election — suggested that one of America’s two major parties was, in effect, acquiring an armed adjunct, like Hezbollah or the old Sinn Fein.

Four months later, the state government of Michigan closed the Capitol in Lansing after protesters gathered outside, many of them armed, including representatives of several local militias; in October, 13 members of a militia called the Wolverine Watchmen were charged in relation to a plot to kidnap government officials including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on their belief that, according to the F.B.I. complaint, she was “violating the U.S. Constitution.” In Oregon — which briefly had to shut down its statehouse the previous year under threat from militias — armed protesters angry over the state’s Covid-19 lockdown orders descended on the Capitol in December. Security-camera footage later revealed that a Republican legislator let them into the building.

The pro-Trump mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 included members of militia networks that law enforcement and extremism researchers regard as significant; members of the Oath Keepers and a group called the Ohio State Regular Militia now face charges related to plotting a coordinated strike on the building, possibly involving dozens of the rioters.

This year’s Lobby Day would be less than two weeks after the Capitol attack, and caravans of militiamen were expected to descend on the statehouse in Richmond. Gun-control activists and sympathetic organizations had thwarted the Virginia Citizens Defense League’s efforts to secure permits for a demonstration by reserving them first. But in November, the group had announced that its members still intended to converge on the Capitol complex in rolling caravans, and on My Militia, an online forum for militia groups, members discussed joining: “We need to get behind this one in great numbers,” one wrote, “and spread the word.”

After Jan. 6, Northam closed off the Capitol grounds in Richmond entirely. Now any organized, armed demonstration beyond the car caravan would be in some form of defiance of the local government. Perhaps that would simply mean civil disobedience; Virginia’s recent gun rallies had been reliably disciplined affairs. But the F.B.I. had warned of the possibility of armed attacks on state capitols by groups emboldened by the relative success of the Jan. 6 attack, which had borne out the theory that power was simply there for the taking, if you were willing to take it. “In terms of credible threats,” Brian Moran, Virginia’s secretary of public safety and homeland security, told reporters the Friday before Lobby Day, “we’re monitoring it.”

The Virginia Citizens Defense League announced that its members still intended to drive to the Capitol, and anyone else was welcome to join. “My main advice is to stay in the caravan,” Van Cleave told me a few days before. “But I’m not going to tell people what to do.”

The militia movement has always challenged the niceties of gun-rights rhetoric.

The gun-rights debate in Virginia is framed by the commonwealth’s experience of the deadliest school shooting in American history, which occurred in the town of Blacksburg on April 16, 2007. That morning, Seung-Hui Cho, a 23-year-old student at Virginia Tech with a history of mental illness, arrived on campus with a pair of semiautomatic pistols and proceeded to kill 32 of his fellow students before dying by suicide. He wounded 17 more, including Colin Goddard, who was sitting in his French class when Cho entered the classroom and shot him four times. After the shooting, Colin and his father, Andrew Goddard, “looked at what could be done in Virginia — what lessons could be learned,” Andrew Goddard told me. They attended a vigil for gun-violence victims hosted by the Virginia Center for Public Safety, a gun-control group, on the Capitol grounds in Richmond on Lobby Day in 2008.

The event, Andrew Goddard recalls, was bracing. Gun rights activists gathered around the vigil participants, shouting, “Guns save lives! Guns save lives!” After Colin spoke, Goddard remembers, “They swarmed around my son and called him a coward for not shooting back.”

Andrew Goddard later became the Virginia Center for Public Safety’s legislative director. Over the next decade, the organization and Van Cleave’s group faced off nearly every Lobby Day in demonstrations that neatly mirrored the social and political divisions of Virginia, which in turn mirrored the divisions of the country as a whole. The gun-control position was broadly identified with Democratic Virginia, the suburban professional class of the Greater Washington area and cities with large Black populations like Norfolk and Newport News. The gun-rights activists more often hailed from the state’s Republican south and west: predominantly rural, culturally Southern and Appalachian, mostly white.

In the years after Virginia Tech, as the prospect of gun-control legislation receded, the standoffs cooled, until the 2016 election. “When Trump came into power,” Goddard said, “it was like the genie was let out of the bottle again.” The same election — in which Virginia went for Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, the state’s junior senator, by more than five points — also revealed the extent to which Virginia’s rural conservatives were losing purchase on power; the northern suburban population was growing, and growing more Democratic. In 2017, the Democrat Ralph Northam won the governor’s race. Two years later, Democrats won control of both houses of the State Legislature for the first time in a quarter of a century. One of the new majority’s first acts on arriving in office was to begin drafting gun-control legislation. “It’s clear that a majority of Virginians support these measures,” Northam told the Legislature as the session began. “They expect votes and laws to make Virginia safer.” Among the laws the Legislature took up was a “red flag” law allowing law-enforcement officers to temporarily seize firearms from someone deemed by a judge to be a public-safety risk.

Red-flag laws already existed in the District of Columbia and 18 other states, and their discretionary scope had made them a particular object of fury among gun rights hard-liners. In November 2019, a 28-year-old Army veteran, Alexander Booth, had Instagrammed in real time a standoff with police officers in Mahopac, a town in upstate New York — which has a red-flag law — over what Booth claimed was their intention to seize his ammunition. In fact, they had come on a domestic-violence call, but his broadcast went viral, as did a hashtag he added: #boogaloo.

“Boogaloo” was an inside joke on the online far right derived from the kitschy 1984 movie “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” for the second civil war that many white supremacists and extremists longed for. The word had recently been adopted by a nebulous movement that called for bringing about such a conflict through acts of random violence, articulated in the kidding-but-not-kidding language and meme vocabulary of message-board trolls. At Lobby Day two months later, the Vice reporter Tess Owen noticed some young men in the crowd wearing mock-military patches featuring Pepe the Frog — the informal mascot of the alt-right — and the words BOOGALOO BOYS: 1ST MEMETIC WARFARE. One of them held a sign: “I have a dream of a Boogaloo.”

As the year wore on, the Boogaloo grew in prominence, embracing an absurdist online aesthetic involving Hawaiian-shirt patterns and igloos (references to “big luau” and “big igloo,” code words for “Boogaloo” adopted to evade law enforcement and social media bans). It also began establishing an offline presence, insinuating itself into anti-lockdown protests and Black Lives Matter demonstrations alike. Boogaloo adherents were charged with murdering two law-enforcement officers in California, plotting to instigate a violent riot in Nevada and conspiring with an undercover F.B.I. employee pretending to be a Hamas operative to blow up a courthouse in Minnesota.

By July, Boogaloo bois, as they now called themselves, merited inclusion alongside the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters — a national militia network formed after Barack Obama’s election — in testimony about domestic extremist threats before the House Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterterrorism.

The Boogaloo’s extreme aversion to authority extended to its own structure, which was nonexistent. But that summer, a militia leader in southern Virginia named Mike Dunn, a 20-year-old former Marine, had begun claiming an affiliation with the Boogaloo and leading local pro-gun marches in a Hawaiian shirt.

Early on the morning of Lobby Day 2021, Dunn and several members of his militia, the Last Sons of Liberty, were preparing for the day’s activities in a hotel room in a Country Inn & Suites outside Richmond. When I knocked at the door, a large, bearded young man poked his head out. He was wearing a jacket that closely resembled a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper, emblazoned with rainbow-toned tigers and ferns, his face half-obscured by a neck gaiter printed with palm trees. He patted me down — “to make sure you’re not wearing a wire,” he said — and ushered me inside.

Dunn, dressed in camouflage, was leaning back in a chair in the corner of the room, his Kimber 1911 Mini handgun on the dresser next to a crumpled Boogaloo flag: a riff on the American one, but with an igloo and a palm tree in place of the stars, and Hawaiian-print stripes. He said he had gone to Washington on Jan. 6 but did not arrive until evening, though other members of his militia were there earlier in the day. Of the group that ransacked the Capitol, he said, “If they want to make the federal government or the state government fall, we can sort it out afterwards. It would be good to give this country a total reset.”

“What do you envision that looking like, the reset?” I asked.

“I’ll leave that to the imagination. There’s not so much I can say on camera about stuff like that. Because it can get you in a lot of legal trouble.”

In their particulars, Dunn’s views often seemed to fall somewhat short of the anarchic bluster of the online Boogaloo. Asked if he was anti-government, he clarified: “I support extremely limited government. I’m anti-big government.” Beyond militia training, his activities in Virginia had mostly involved acts of civil disobedience against local gun restrictions, and he had joined previous Lobby Day protests. He was particularly incensed by an ordinance that the city of Richmond passed in September, banning firearms at permitted events like the upcoming Lobby Day.

I noted that the red-flag law of the year before was passed by a majority of the State Legislature, representing a majority of Virginians. A Washington Post poll shortly before the law passed found that it enjoyed 82 percent support, even 72 percent of Republicans. “Isn’t that an authentic expression of the will of the people?” I asked.

“No, because anybody can go against the will of the people,” he said. “People who represent us can still choose to go against us.”

A young man who introduced himself as Peezy was loading a bag with zip ties (“for defensive purposes”) and a gas mask on one of the beds. “Governor Northam said that in the last election, we proved we wanted to vote in gun control,” he said. “But 93 percent of localities in the state of Virginia claimed Second Amendment sanctuary status. That is an overwhelming majority saying, ‘We do not want more gun laws.’” (The figure is closer to 61 percent, according to the Virginia Citizens Defense League.) Coming from a man in an androgynous floral-print ensemble and Ninja Turtle-emblazoned tactical vest, this was a remarkably conventional Republican argument — that land mass, not population, determined who was in the majority and the minority.

Dunn was a Trump fan as a teenager in 2016, but he said he had undergone a conversion since — “from being a statist, bootlicking Republican to supporting the Constitution as it should be supported.” Earlier he had emphasized: “We’re looking for a revolution, not a civil war.” I asked what he thought the difference was. “Revolution is when it’s against the governing bodies; civil war is when it’s against the people,” he said.

“You would pick up guns against the government if it came to that?” I asked.

“We will use the Second Amendment in the capacity that it was intended for.”

‘If they want to make the federal government or the state government fall, we can sort it out afterwards. It would be good to give this country a total reset.’

Dunn’s group arrived at the Capitol just before 11 a.m., fully kitted out in Hawaiian shirts and tactical vests, palm-tree-print neck gaiters obscuring their faces up to the eyes, military-style rifles — with loaded high-capacity magazines, Dunn had promised, which were prohibited on the streets around the Capitol — in hand. Several dozen reporters and photographers had gathered on Ninth Street, which was divided down the middle by a police barricade. More than a few of them were moving stiffly, corseted in body armor. The nearby Virginia Supreme Court building was evacuated three days earlier on account of a bomb threat. One private security assessment, noting the Boogaloo bois’ likely reprise of their presence at the last Lobby Day, warned of “a heightened concern vis-à-vis stochastic incidents of violence that may unfold between gun owners, law enforcement and any journalists covering the event.”

The Boogaloo bois lined up along the sidewalk opposite the Capitol complex, in front of a closed municipal parking garage. A media scrum dutifully gathered. Dunn pointed out the Black Lives Matter patch on the vest one of his bois was wearing — Dunn had proclaimed his support for the movement’s right to free speech if not its aims — but his voice was hard to hear over the camera shutters. A young man in the back of the crowd grew agitated. “I’m sick of this being a boring standoff!” he shouted. “Isn’t somebody going to do something?”

A few minutes later, another small armed band rounded the corner — half a dozen men with khaki Kevlar helmets, tactical vests and rifles. They carried with them an effigy in a jacket and tie with a crown on its head and a sign around its neck that read NORTHAM THE INFRINGER and stood it up against a wall. Some of the reporters detached themselves from Dunn’s crew and went to photograph the effigy. The group’s de facto spokesman would not give his name and described his comrades only as “concerned citizens.” He was in the midst of a denunciation of the Legislature’s gun legislation from the year before when a commotion arose up the street: A small detachment of Proud Boys, the far-right group known for street fighting, had just rounded the corner. The militiamen abruptly beat a retreat, and the reporters dutifully assembled around the Proud Boys.

Back at Dunn’s spot on the sidewalk, a reporter asked what he thought of the Capitol attack. “I think the American people are tired,” he said. “I think it was the right thing for the wrong reason.”

“So you guys propose — what kind of system of rule? Anarchy, then?” another reporter asked.

The street was now mostly filled with people, and almost all of them seemed to be members of the media. There were murmurs of something like disappointment. Some militia leaders, noting the increased law-enforcement attention paid to their groups after Jan. 6, had announced their intentions to stay home. Nevertheless, there had been expectations of a sizable showing.

But by late morning, none of the larger militia groups had materialized, and it was looking increasingly unlikely that they would. In their stead were small bands of men who invariably described themselves as “concerned citizens.” One by one, they did as Dunn’s crew had done, posting themselves against a wall in their thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment, waiting with transparent eagerness for reporters to swarm around them and feigning reluctance when they did.

Suddenly a new figure appeared on the street — tall and slim, wearing a red plaid shirt and black track pants tucked into black rubber boots, like a commercial fisherman who had just rolled out of his bunk. He had a Makarov pistol on his belt and a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, a GoPro-equipped helmet buckled over a balaclava and dark sunglasses that together obscured his entire face. On his tactical vest were a Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, a patch that said SILENT BRIGADE and another with pronouns — HE/HIM/HIS — against the blue, pink and white of the transgender flag, which he also flew, below a U.S. Army flag, from a length of PVC pipe. The reporters gathered around him.

“Do you represent any specific group?” I asked.

“I’m just independent,” he said.

“What do you see as the path forward?” a man next to me in the scrum demanded to know. “It’s clear people are pretty upset with the government. Do you want to keep the government? Do you want to abolish it? Do you want anarchy? Do you want socialism? Marxism? Something like that? Or what?”

The demonstrator considered this for a second. “Um, I mean, I think we’re not at the point where we need to have a revolution or anything like that. I definitely want things to work out. And one thing that would help is if we’re able to come together.”

“It’s clear that a lot of people wanted a revolution from the 6th. Where do you fall on that?”

“It’s not time for a revolution at all,” he repeated. “Anyone who wants a revolution right now is either ignorant of what it’s going to bring about, or they’re just a violent person.”

A slightly embarrassed self-awareness seemed to descend on the scrum. The whole scene suddenly appeared ludicrous: We had no idea who this person was, or whether he meant what he said. We knew nothing about him at all, really, except that he had a military-style rifle slung over his shoulder. What it all resembled more than anything else, it occurred to me, was the spin room outside a presidential debate: the corridor where reporters throng around the representatives of the various campaigns and party committees to take down their quotes obfuscating whatever it was the reporters had just seen with their own eyes.

The spin room lays bare the essential fallacy at the heart of bad political journalism, which is that proximity to power automatically grants a person an authority or insight that others lack. A similar logic was at work on the street in Richmond, where those of us who had come to cover the rally were operating on the tacit understanding that the simple act of carrying a gun in defiance of the local law gave a person standing to speak to a national political moment in which defiance of the law had become the de facto position of a political party representing the votes of more than 74 million Americans. This was, in a sense, its own kind of ideology — one that the desultory handful of militiamen on the street shared with the many factions of the Boogaloo, with the mob at the U.S. Capitol, with the outgoing president of the United States.

American views on gun rights, by most polling, fall well short of the assertions of Second Amendment absolutists. But the absolutists’ sustained influence in politics has persisted, at least in part because the prospect of them taking their interpretation of the Second Amendment to its logical conclusion seemed so improbable. It is an open question whether this changes after the past year, in which armed protesters have increasingly encroached on the workings of democratically elected governments, over a set of concerns that increasingly sprawl well beyond gun rights. The idea of the gun as a safeguard against tyranny could not possibly hold once the word “tyranny” had been leached entirely of fixed meaning.

The Boogaloo’s gleeful efforts to push the gun-rights debate to its limit have been clarifying: As one meme put it, “The 2nd Amendment is about KILLING PEOPLE. If you don’t like it, too [expletive] bad.” At a minimum, it is about using the implicit threat of doing so as a means of asserting the privilege of walking away from the table of representative democracy when the outcome doesn’t suit you. Possessing a gun doesn’t protect free speech, as gun rights activists often claim. The gun is the speech.

A couple of hours away, the National Guard was amassing by the tens of thousands in Washington, in preparation for whatever armed response might attend the transfer of power two days hence. The fact that none materialized, and that so little materialized in Richmond, suggested an understanding that the conditions had changed. Earlier that morning, I asked Dunn if he intended to be at the inauguration, and he shook his head. “We’ll be on standby.”

For now, they were standing in the street, waiting for a revolution. Eventually the demonstrator with the pronoun patch, despite his doubts about said revolution, walked over and joined them, posing with them for the cameras. They wanted opposite things, apparently, but they were joined in a very American devotion to the gun above all else, and an equally American optimism that wherever that shared devotion might lead us, we could figure the rest out when we got there.

Charles Homans is the politics editor for the magazine.

Mark Peterson is a photographer in New York who won the 2018 W. Eugene Smith Grant for his ongoing project about white supremacists in the United States. He last photographed Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A. leader, for the magazine.

Additional design and development by Shannon Lin.

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