Mike “Wompus” Nieznany is a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran who walks with a cane due to injuries he won his service. This disability doesn’t stop Nieznany from making a living promoting traditional motorcycle roof racks from her home in Gainesville. Nor will it stop him when the time comes to travel to Washington, D. C. , heavily armed and in a position to make his component to overthrow the U. S. government.
Millions of other would-be insurgents will also be there, Nieznany says, “a ticking time bomb” pointing at the Capitol. “There are a lot of other fully armed people wondering what’s going on in this country,” he says. Or do we get rid of him?We’re only going to take a safe amount before we fight. “The 2024 election, he adds, may be the trigger.
Nieznany is not a loner. His political comments on the social networking site Quora garnered four thousand four thousand perspectives in the first two weeks of November and more than four million in total. He is one of many grassroots Republicans who own guns and in recent months have spoken out loudly about them. They want to overthrow – through force if it is mandatory – a federal government that they are illegitimate, excessive and corrosive to American freedom.
The phenomenon goes far beyond the expansion of militias, which have been a feature of American life at least since the Ku Klux Klan came to strength after the Civil War. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill and possibly would have played an organizational role, having more members. Law enforcement has long tracked and infiltrated those groups. What Nieznany stands for is anything else: a much broader and more diffuse movement of more or less ordinary people, fueled by disinformation, welded in combination through social media, and well-armed. In 2020, 17 million Americans bought 40 million guns and by 2021, they were on track to load another 20 million. If the old trends continue, buyers will be predominantly white, Republican, and Southerners or rural.
The massive and overwhelmingly Republican gun rights motion is consistent with the growing confidence among many Republicans that the federal government is an illegitimate tyranny that will have to be overthrown by all means necessary. This combustible formula increases the risk of large-scale armed attacks around the 2024 presidential election : attacks that may make the January 6 insurgency look like a toothless coup by comparison. “The concept of other people opposing elections in the United States has gone from being absolutely implausible to everything we want to achieve started making plans and preparing,” said Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, an expert on gun policy and constitutional law.
Democrats and Republicans are wasting confidence in the integrity of American elections. Democrats worry that voter suppression and election interference through Republican state officials will deprive millions of Americans of their voice on the ballot. % of Democrats saw voter suppression as the biggest risk to U. S. elections. Republicans mistakenly believe Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election was fraudulent.
Under the Constitution, Congress and the Supreme Court are meant to resolve such claims in duels. Given the increasing intensity and polarization of political life, either aspect would settle for a resolution that would deliver a controversial outcome of the 2024 election to the other. ?
Such a move will most likely draw tens of millions of protesters and counter-protesters into the streets, especially around the U. S. Capitol and many state capitals, plunging the country into chaos. While many Democrats are susceptible to protesting, a higher percentage of Republican protesters would almost in fact bring guns. Whether the Supreme Court’s ruling, scheduled for mid-2022, on the New York State rifle
If gun violence erupts in the 2024 election, repression may also fall on the U. S. military, which would likely be reluctant to take up arms in opposition to U. S. citizens. Fact: A giant subset of one of the two parties has been systematically assembled for years for the same reason.
“I hope it’s too far-fetched to get here,” says Erica De Bruin, an assistant professor of government at Hamilton College who studies coups around the world, “but now it’s in the realm of the plausible. “
Enemy at the gates
Many Republicans see themselves less and less as citizens represented through the federal government and more as tyrannized victims of that government. More than three-quarters of Republicans reported “little confidence” in the federal government in a national poll through Grinnell College in October; Only a minority of Democrats agreed. From this point of view, non-violent elections will not save the situation. More than two in 3 Republicans think democracy is under attack, according to Grinnell ballotArray, which echoes the effects of a CNN vote in September. Half of the Democrats say the same thing.
The mainstream media is filled with howls of protest opposed to the political outrages of Republican leaders, which reflect the ideals of the big party, but the small newspapers in the rural areas of the Red State that are at the center of the base of the Republican Party give voice to a simpler image: politics is dead; it’s time to fight. “Wake up America!” Read a September op-ed denouncing Democrats in The Gaston Gazette, founded in Gastonia, North Carolina “The enemy is on our doorstep, God willing, it’s not too past to turn back the rising tide of this dark regime. “The article is Continuing to cite Thomas Paine’s exhortation to the colonists to take up arms in opposition to the British. “We are in a civil war,” the Republicans also warned in a letter published in September in The New Mexico Sun, “between classical Americans and those who need to impose socialism on this country and thus obtain a complete government over its citizens. “
Evidence is mounting that a significant portion of Republicans are likely to oppose violence against the government and political parties at war. More than a hundred violent threats, coupled with many death threats, were opposed to election officials and election officials in battlefield states. in 2020, according to a Reuters investigation published in September, all the threats Reuters could touch known as Trump supporters. In October 2020, thirteen men were charged with conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat; They were all aligned with the political right. Nearly one-third of Republicans agree that “true American patriots can use violence to save our country,” according to a September vote conducted through the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute. Democrats who felt the same way.
Firearms fit into an essential component of the equation. “Americans are brandishing guns in public spaces, driven by other people they oppose politically or by public decisions they disagree with,” concludes an August article in the Northwestern University Law Review. were plentiful when many anti-COVID protesters piled up at the Michigan State Capitol in May 2020, some of the armed protesters attempted to enter Capitol Hall.
Those who carry weapons at a political demonstration would possibly theoretically have nonviolent intentions, but there are many reasons to think otherwise. An October examination through Everytown for Gun Safety and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) tested 560 protests involving participating armed individuals during an 18-month era through mid-2021, and found that one-sixth of them have become violent, and some have caused the deaths.
One indication of how far Republicans would possibly be willing to go to violently oppose the approval government is their positive reaction to the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill. Half of Republicans said the crowd was “defending freedom,” according to a CBS/YouGov vote held just after the uprising. Today, two-thirds of Republicans have come to deny that it was an attack, according to an October vote through Quinnipiac University. “There is little duty to this insurgency,” says UCLA’s WINKler. “Right-wing rhetoric has only gotten worse since then.
Most Republican leaders are cautious when it comes to supporting violence that opposes the government, but not all. Former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a questionable figure who remains popular with many Republicans, reportedly told an enthusiastic gathering of Trump supporters in October that if and when a “serious” emerges, “there’s very little I can do about it. “
Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a prominent Republican popular among the rank and file, said the Jan. 6 insurgents were simply doing what the Declaration of Independence tells true patriots to do, seeking to “overthrow tyrants. “Democracy, he added, are Black Lives Matter protesters and “Marxist-Communist” Democratic agents. Greene and Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a North Carolina Republican, called some of the insurgents “political prisoners. “
Trump himself, of course, has maintained a steady flow of violence among his supporters since the start of his first presidential campaign. In 2016, he publicly declared that he could shoot in the street without wasting any of his political support, and then encouraged participants in his rallies to attack protesters and journalists. When protesters were taken away at a rally in Miami, Trump warned that next time “I’ll be a little more violent. “At a 2016 rally in Las Vegas, he brazenly complained to the crowd that security was not brutal enough for a protester they were shooting. “I’d like to hit him in the face, I’ll tell you,” he said.
Today, Trump brazenly declares that the Jan. 6 rioters are “great people. “In October, he warned that Republicans didn’t have to worry about voting in the 2022 or 2024 election because of their considerations about fraud in the 2020 election. , said it would do so by achieving an “even more excellent victory in November 2024”. The concept that Republicans can simply turn their backs on the ballot box while leading Trump to glory only makes sense if Trump considers a path to strength that doesn’t require votes.
Republicans approve of this kind of speech. Quinnipiac’s October vote found that while 94% of Democrats insist Trump is undermining democracy, 85% of Republicans say he protects it.
Where are the weapons
In his acclaimed account of the early days of the American Revolution, “The British Are Coming,” Rick Atkinson explains one of the main reasons why the United States has become the first British colony to effectively win freedom, where others had failed. “Unlike the Irish and other submissive peoples,” he wrote, “the Americans were heavily armed. Muskets, he says, were “as common as boilers” among settlers, and American riflemen were among the most productive snipers in the world. with firearms, combined with the settlers’ deep penchant for getting rid of what they saw as the tyranny of the government, assistance would triumph against all odds.
Today, the many Republicans who have convinced themselves that they too will have to get rid of a tyrannical government have many weapons. Americans own about 400 million weapons, according to the Swiss-based Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva. (The government of the EE. UU. No tracks gun ownership. )The vast majority of those guns belong to Republicans. Galup found that some of all Republicans own guns, nearly 3 times the rate of gun ownership among Democrats. Gun owners are predominantly male and white, and are more likely to live in the rural South than anywhere else. These demographics have perfect compatibility with the core segment of the Republican Party.
Arms sales have soared in the past two years. Approximately 17 million people, or more than 6% of the population, purchased 40 million guns in 2020 alone, according to Harvard and Northeastern universities. millions to the total, according to arms industry company Small Arms Analytics
While there is knowledge to recommend that Democrats are expanding their modest percentage of gun purchases, recent history recommends that the vast majority of those guns pass to Republicans. According to a 2017 Pew Research Center poll, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents numbered more than two. they are sometimes more likely to own a gun than their Democratic counterparts.
Former Iowa Rep. Steve King, long known as someone who is afraid to speak out loud what many other Republicans think, is convinced his party is better armed. “People are still talking about another civil war,” he posted on Facebook in 2019. A camp has about 8 trillion bullets. . . I wonder who would win.
The push for violent insurrection among Republicans draws some of its power from the more commonly Republican gun rights movement and vice versa. This is a new phenomenon. Gun rights have long been a passionate cause of conservatives, never posing an obvious risk to democracy, but that’s fast becoming.
In 2000, 60% of homeowners with guns cited hunting as an explanation for why they bought guns, according to a Gallup poll. Most of the others are indexed as “sport,” which means target shooting. This substitution was driven by the development of paranoia about street crime and mob violence, a concern constantly inflated through Fox and other right-wing media outlets, which have long been talking about the concept that urban gangs and other rioters are increasingly rampant. suburbs and beyond.
Over the more than 4 years, those fears have faded into anti-government, pro-Trump, and in some cases white supremacist movements. “We’ve noticed another view of the blossoming of gun rights, one that focuses on the desire to own guns to fight a tyrannical government,” Winkler said. The promotion of this concept has made it more likely that some other people will come to see the government as a tyrannical government that will have to be overthrown. “Deep state radicalism, aimed at gun rights, echoes on social media with a higher proportion of Republicans and other channels of communication.
The gun industry did not create this confusion between gun ownership and a nearby patriotic armed uprising, but it did magnify it. A 2020 article on the online page of AZ Big Media, Arizona’s largest business news publisher, pleaded with readers, “If you’re waiting to buy the gun you’ve been around for a while, now is the time. Wait until the presidential election. We don’t know what’s going to happen, however, no matter who is elected, the chaos and violence are probably getting worse. “
Palmetto State Armory, a firearms portion manufacturer and firearms store in Columbia, South Carolina, explains it on its website: “Our project is to maximize freedom, not our profits. We need to sell as many AR-15 and AK. -47 rifles as we can and put them into non-unusual use in America today,” adding that this “preserves the rights of other people who oppose tyranny. “A 2019 Drew University study noted that a YouTube video of 4 of the most viewed gun brands invoked patriotism. “There’s a publicity interest that fuels that sense of need for guns to protect against the government,” says Risa Brooks, a political scientist at Marquette University.
The National Rifle Association played an important role in selling the theme “Own Weapons to Protect America from the Tyranny of the Left. “”If the violent left brings its terror to our communities, neighborhoods or homes, it will find the determination, strength, and full force of American freedom in the hands of the American people,” said Wayne, executive director of the NRA. LaPierre in 2017. La same year, an NRA spokesperson criticized Trump’s opponents, adding, “The only way to prevent this, the only way to save our country and our freedom is to combat this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth. . . “There’s not much doubt about what’s going to clench that fist.
The NRA also warned that the gun control policies followed by the Nazis and directed at Jews were an indispensable component of the Holocaust. This claim has been absolutely refuted through historians, but Ben Carson, Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has publicly connected it. Texas Senator Ted Cruz also explicitly connected gun rights to combat opposed to the federal threat, noting that guns “serve as the ultimate control opposed to the tyranny of government. “Trump himself alluded to the darker links between gun ownership and the fall of a Democratic-led government, which proposed his first presidential crusade that the “People of the Second Amendment” could prevent Hillary Clinton from winning.
How it can happen
What can also lead to large-scale armed risk or even violence around the 2024 elections?There is possibly only one narrow path around it: a comfortable and undeniable victory for Trump, assuming he is the Republican nominee. Depression from this loss, however, is unlikely to embark on mass protests against what may also be a valid electoral victory.
But if Trump loses, somehow, and is unable to reverse the effects through legal or political means, it is highly likely that Republicans will claim that the election was fraudulent. His stolen presidency brought an insurrectionary mob to the US Capitol Most of the time it was unarmed, no doubt thanks to Washington DC’s strict gun laws.
In 2024, this kind of crowd, which will have been fed for 4 years with false accusations of “grand theft” and exhortations to combat tyranny, will probably be much, much larger. If gun legislation is weakened through the Supreme Court, they in addition to Washington, D. C. , the ACLED report found that Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Oregon face the greatest threat of armed uprisings in contested elections, followed by North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, California. But shortly after the Jan. 6 uprising, the FBI warned that all 50 state capitals were in danger. “There has been a recent and disturbing effort to provide running with weapons as a proper way to challenge the outcome of an election. I don’t like it,” Brooks said of Marquette.
If Trump wins, albeit by a small margin that Democrats can attribute to Republican legislation and tactics aimed at suppressing Democratic votes, large protests across the country are inevitable. Democrats might not have to be imaginative to make this claim: In 2021, 43 states proposed more than 250 laws restricting access to the vote. Georgia has reduced the number of polling stations, a practice to the maximum aimed at communities with a higher percentage of minority residents. Iowa closed the maximum early voting. Arkansas has more requirements for voter IDENTIFICATION and Utah has made it easier to selectively purge electorates from its lists.
If Trump loses votes, but the loss is offset through the movements of election officials in partisan states, legislatures or governors in primary battlefield states, and that overthrow is protected through a Republican Congress or the Supreme Court, protests are inevitable again. , this kind of reversal is far from unlikely: there are 23 states where Republicans are the legislature and government, adding several of the battlefield states. In 2022, Republicans are expected to take from 3 other key states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Any party-controlled state is well placed to try to cancel an electoral vote, as Trump and many Republicans have suggested that state officials do so in 2020. Demand electoral fraud and give us more strength to undermine elections at the local level,” De Bruin said. For these and other reasons, the United States has fallen into the widely cited Freedom in the World ranking of countries according to its degree of democracy. and Mongolia.
Whatever cases may drive large-scale protests through Democrats in 2024, their presence in the streets may bring out the armed Republican counter-protesters who decided to protect Trump’s nominal victory and, in their minds, preserve democracy that opposes left-wing mobs. “It’s just a fear that if Trump asks them to go out and crack down on the crowds, they might react,” said Lindsay Cohn, an associate professor of national security affairs at the U. S. Naval War College.
Nieznany, the Vietnamese veterinarian, insists that if Democratic protests come with violence, as in the case of several Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 in the most commonly remote cases, then right-wing counter-protesters will be justified in firing. “Stones, bottles and bricks can kill you as fast as a bullet,” he says. This is the kind of logic that, in August 2020, led Kyle Rittenhouse and his AR-15-style rifle to a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. where he shot 3 protesters, killing two, claiming to protect himself. A jury acquitted him of all charges.
From their movements the demonstrations of recent years, the police force can be counted on for a forceful response, that is, opposed to the democratic demonstrators. A third of the time right-wing protests. In any case, few police forces are in a position to confront tens of thousands of armed protesters well.
Enter the army
If the police are unable or unwilling to deal with an armed uprising, the last hope for a nonviolent solution is likely to be the National Guard and the military. Only the governor can call the National Guard in a state and only the president can deploy To send the military to quell the unrest on American soil, the president will have to invoke the Insurrection Act, last used in 1992 through President George H. W. Bush to help repair the Los Angeles riots.
Joe Biden will most likely remain president at the beginning of election-related violence, so if the National Guard didn’t calm things down in one or more states, or if a governor refused to call the Guard, he would fall. directly on Biden’s shoulders to make this call. He would not want the cooperation of the state government to do so. “It would be a perfectly valid role for the U. S. military in those circumstances,” said Kori Schake, director of foreign policy and defense studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
The National Guard or military would nearly triumph to end the worst of violence and government, but two key questions arise: Would the army’s leadership conform to Biden’s orders to deploy in opposition to an armed uprising?And if that were the case, would the base stick to orders from its commanders to take up arms in opposition to their fellow Americans whose motivations might resonate with many of their own?
Military leaders still feel punished by the protest after Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accompanied Trump to a photo shoot in Lafayette Square, which was forcibly stripped of nonviolent protesters in June 2020, Brooks said. He’s going to be reluctant to participate,” he says. The military takes an oath to the Constitution, not to a specific president. “Biden, too, will likely see the call to the military as a last resort, he adds. But if the scenario is dire and Biden is justified in making the call, control will deliver, regardless of their fears, she says.
As for the option of the guard or army base refusing to carry out orders to take up arms against armed Trump supporters, Cohn of the Naval War College considers it unlikely. “There’s not much evidence that the base is solidly Trump. “”he says. ” But whatever their beliefs, they are very professional. No more than a small percentage would refuse. “
She says Trump has worked hard to align himself with the base, even distancing himself from the military leadership, and yet there were few signs of open acts from the grassroots when Trump tried to gather crowds in January for his baseless allegations of voter fraud. even though Trump’s former national security adviser and retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn at the same time were blatantly calling on the military to take control of the government.
In the absence of a strong reaction from the police, National Guard, and military, it’s simple to see how Republicans could necessarily take the country just for its large arsenal. “Both sides can also be convinced of the illegitimacy of each other’s actions,” Winkler says. What is asymmetrical is the ability to inflict violence. “
Hopefully this will not get to that point and that there will be a nonviolent solution to what will likely be a debatable and highly debatable choice, but this outcome is not assured. And even if a crash ends quietly before going too far, experiencing a near-accident can leave our already fragile democracy more weakened and vulnerable. It’s hard to say what it would take to fix it.
Nieznany can speak on behalf of millions of people when he insists it’s too late. “Too many of us are willing to give our lives to take back the country,” he said. “We want a civil war.