Good People with Guns? More like a Militia with Dubious Intent
The COVID crisis has brought out the best in some and the worst in others.
The COVID crisis has brought out the best in some and the worst in others.
It delivered a blow economically and socially that put us on the ropes. The stock market plunged, businesses were forced to close and a lot of people lost their jobs. Most states went into lockdown and we all had to go without seeing friends and family members for months. Our children couldn’t go to school, folks couldn’t go to church or the gym and we couldn’t go out to eat. Shopping became a harrowing experience.
Then came the death of George Floyd, right on the heels of the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery, and the cracking pressure cooker that was our society broke open.
On May 31, I walked down to Memorial Park in Wenatchee, Wa. and captured footage that showed more than a thousand people peacefully assembling and demonstrating in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and posted it on social media. The video got picked up and packaged along with other examples of peaceful protests in rural America and broadcast nationwide by CBS. I saw it as a proud moment for our little town.
A week later many of those same people gathered again but this time they were met with armed, organized, and in some cases threatening counter-protesters in the form of a paramilitary group. Of course the pretense was this was a response to rumors of ANTIFA agitators being bused in to wreak havoc.
A local vigilante bat signal went up on social media and the call to arms was answered by 20 to 30 individuals who came outfitted in light tactical gear with sidearms on their hips. Some were carrying semiautomatic long guns or had them strapped across their chests. They said they were there to protect businesses from looting. They said they were there to protect protestors.
What they actually did was stalk and intimidate a group of mostly teenagers, women, and children for 2.4 miles from Memorial Park to Walla Walla Point Park. I wrote an op-ed in the local newspaper about it with the facts I had at the time, but I kept following up and what I discovered was disturbing.
What I uncovered was a month-long pattern of abuse that was both organized and systematic in one specific case, and spontaneous and individual in others. It’s not just about the vigilante paramilitary that used a private Facebook group (we’ll get to that later) to muster on June 6, it’s also about the individuals who shouted threats and intimidated protesters from Wenatchee to East Wenatchee to Leavenworth and Chelan without any clear orders from a local leader, as far as I can tell.
The Google map below has pins on it that mark where and on what day protestors were threatened or harassed, or witnesses saw it happening to someone else. I created it after communicating with more than twenty people who were involved in Black Lives Matter demonstrations during the month of June 2020.
As you can see the incidents range from June 1 to June 27, but let’s focus on the events of June 6 and 7 in Wenatchee.
A homegrown militia calling themselves “Wenatchee Militia QRF” (which stands for quick response force) established a private Facebook group on June 4 to coordinate their response to the Black Lives Matter protest and march planned for June 6.
This post created quite a bit of chatter and plenty of vague violent fantasy scenarios, but it was a post the next day, June 5 where they got to logistics.
A long comment thread grew below this post and debate ensued about how to organize and identify each other, without looking too organized or identifiable.
I consider myself pretty well-versed in extremist language at this point, but I had to look up what a “gray man approach” is. The conversation also went into how to establish and maintain realtime communications for the vigilantes to coordinate in the field.
After some discussion they decided on a Discord server as their communication platform of choice. They also discussed what to pack for medical aid in case they ended up shooting people.
Tampons seem to be the unanimous choice.
Even though the group was private (which didn’t stop me from getting in) there seems to be some awareness that these discussions shouldn’t see the light of day when it comes to the general public, or the FBI.
Now we come to the evening of June 5, when we have our first rumors of ANTIFA. This is important to note because they were already planning their operation prior to the ANTIFA rumors.
Some members suggested calling in the help of other vigilantes in the region.
The irony of calling in vigilantes from other towns to guard against fictional agitators seems to be completely lost on them.
Although these people had been discussing how to organize and coordinate as a paramilitary without being identified as such, they showed no concern over being stopped or thwarted in any way by the Wenatchee Police Department.
The administrator of the group even notified local law enforcement as to when and where they would be gathering ahead of the march on June 6.
He even invited them to “swing by and listen in.”
Once the operation was underway, they pretty much switched over to their Discord channel to continue communications in realtime as they followed protestors to Walla Walla Point Park.
The group has disappeared in the last 48 hours, either because the administrators deleted it or Facebook removed it as a part of their purge of groups affiliated with the extremist “Boogaloo” movement.
Either way, it wasn’t removed before I (and others) found a way in and collected hundreds of screenshots. The screenshots above reveal the level of coordination, organization and conspiracy that was being employed — from the ANTIFA ruse they adopted at the last minute to justify following peaceful protestors around town with semi-automatic weapons, to acknowledging they shouldn’t say anything in the group they wouldn’t say to an FBI agent to best practices on using feminine hygiene products as battlefield dressings for bullet wounds.
The screenshots below illustrate some of the extreme malevolence that was on display and woven into the fabric of the group’s culture.
I decided to keep tugging on this thread after seeing that a Douglas County Commissioner mustered with the militia on June 6 and was in the Wenatchee Militia QRF Facebook group while people were expressing these disturbing things yet said nothing. I also witnessed an alarming amount of apathy online and in person in response to what I believe was a pattern of clearly disturbing behavior over the course of a full month. Some of the incidents I pinned on the Google map may qualify as hate crimes. Taking a stand against acts like these isn’t about your political proclivities — it’s about your sense of decency and whether you have the courage of your convictions. Apathy is adjacent to cruelty.
The Political Stuff
I wouldn’t be doing my due diligence if I didn’t mention this statement from Wenatchee Mayor Frank Kuntz posted on June 17 in reference to the events that transpired because of the Black Lives Matter protest and march on June 6. East Wenatchee mayor Jerrilea Crawford also released a statement on June 17 about the issue of race in our society.
Serving as an elected official at any level of government is an unenviable position. No matter what you do, people will criticize you. And when we have people at the highest levels of federal government abdicating their responsibility to provide moral leadership, that responsibility falls upon the shoulders of people further down the line. It’s not fair, but it is our current reality.
It’s tough to take a stand against a very loud, angry minority who are politically entitled, emotionally unstable and potentially dangerous. It’s not easy to do the right thing, but it’s easier when you do it together. That’s why it would be powerful to see local elected leaders at every level, from school board officials to city council members to county commissioners and state representatives, sign a statement like this.
The Legal Stuff
The vigilantes said they were there to protect businesses and even the protestors themselves. They claimed they were exercising their Second Amendment rights legally under state and federal laws, but I disagree.
Shawn Vestal wrote an excellent piece in the Spokesman-Review that summed it up well. Washington’s constitution puts the government’s civil authority in charge of military action. State law says any “organized body” beyond the recognized state militia or U.S. armed forces, “may not associate themselves together as a military company or organize or parade in public with firearms.”
Furthermore, the Supreme Court has weighed in on this issue. In the landmark 2008 case that made clear gun ownership is an individual right, District of Columbia v. Heller. Heller was a broad expansion of the individual right to bear arms, but the court made it clear that the Second Amendment, “does not prevent the prohibition of private paramilitary organizations.”
These people used a Facebook group to communicate and organize prior to the protests of June 6. They discussed insignias, symbols and uniforms they could use to identify each other. Then they used Discord to communicate and stalk protestors in realtime while brandishing weapons.
This was not an unorganized, spontaneous response to a credible threat. This was an organized paramilitary group using a thinly-veiled pretense to spread hate, intimidate fellow citizens and disrupt the peace.
There’s no question they were bad actors there in bad faith who could have seriously hurt or killed people. It’s not even a question that some of them wanted to do so.
The two questions now are:
Will there be repercussions for any of this?
Will it happen again? If so, when?
I didn’t have the time or the space in this follow up to fully cover every incident that was pinned on the map, but I would like to highlight two of the individual and spontaneous incidents that I think highlight the racist backlash to peaceful protesting for equality under the law.
On June 7, after a vigil for George Floyd in downtown Wenatchee, a woman who is a foster mother caring for a three-year-old black boy was approached and harassed by by a group of people who followed her to her car on Wenatchee Avenue.
“We left during the vigil because they were going to have 8 minutes of silence and as you well know keeping a 3-year-old silent for 8 minutes is near impossible so instead we left early. There was a group on Wenatchee Avenue as we walked to our car they followed talking loudly about us, I turned around and said ‘Excuse me?’ and she said, ‘I said I should call CPS (child protective services) and get that black baby taken away.’”
The other incident that I want to highlight occurred on June 6 at the crosswalk on Mission and Palouse Streets, when a man in a white Ford pickup truck decided to start pushing into the sidewalk while pedestrians were crossing the street.
I got this clip from someone who was there, and spoke with two others who witnessed the incident in order to better understand what happened.
“He pushed the dude with his car — my friend was trying to catch it on film. I didn’t see the whole thing because when I crossed the street he backed up, but he was inching up again when I crossed. It was clear he was upset. It was scary.”
— Kristen Noelle
I’d like to thank all the people who responded to my requests for interviews and commend those who went on the record about these incidents for their bravery. Sunshine is the best disinfectant, in my opinion, and if no one would have been willing to talk it’s a good chance most of these incidents would have gone unknown and unremarked upon.
Sources:
What We Know About the Shooting Death of Ahmaud Arbery, New York Times
Moments of dignity, fortitude and restraint in this week’s protests, CBS News
Leave the armed patrols to police officers, The Wenatchee World
Facebook to remove anti-government ‘Boogaloo’ groups, NBC News
Statement from Mayor of Wenatchee, City of Wenatchee Facebook page
Open Letter to the East Wenatchee Community, City of East Wenatchee Website
Spokane elected leaders issue statement strongly opposing ‘armed vigilantes’ during Spokane protests, KHQ News Spokane
Shawn Vestal: There may be a tool to block paramilitary demonstrations — and the Supreme Court has sanctioned it, The Spokesman-Review