Experts: Alleged plot against Michigan governor signals ominous shift
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — They railed against politicians, conducted military-style exercises and spoke darkly of confronting tyrants scheming to seize their guns and enslave them.
Yet historian JoEllen Vinyard says the “citizen militia" activists she got to know in the 1990s didn't seem like the types who would abduct a governor or stage a coup.
“I don't think they were dangerous," said Vinyard, an Eastern Michigan University professor emeritus and author of a book about far-right movements in the state. “They reminded me of the good old boys I knew growing up in Nebraska."
But as four men charged with conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer go on trial Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids, Vinyard and other political extremism scholars say things have changed in recent years. Their arrests came about three months before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that led to charges against many right-wing extremists and militants.
In contrast to militants from before, who mostly avoided bloodshed with the horrific exception of the Oklahoma City bombing, some modern successors have taken a more radical and potentially violent turn.
“This is a different type of domestic terrorism phenomenon than we've faced in previous decades — completely different from anything I've observed,” said Javed Ali, a University of Michigan professor who served with the FBI and intelligence agencies.
“You've got all these points on a very diverse threat spectrum — not centralized in any one corner, no single groups, no national leadership, completely disorganized and disaggregated,” Ali said. “It's difficult for law enforcement to spot these threats. The Whitmer plot is a case in point."
The alleged kidnapping conspiracy involved members of a little-known cell called the “Wolverine Watchmen” and others who attended a July 2020 meeting in Ohio of self-styled “militia” leaders from several states, according to court documents.
They were angry about pandemic lockdowns and other policies they considered dictatorial, investigators said. Some had joined a protest months earlier at the Michigan Capitol in Lansing, where armed demonstrators faced off with police and some carried guns into the Senate gallery.
Federal prosecutors in October 2020 charged six suspects in the alleged plot, including Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, who have pleaded guilty. Garbin received a six-year prison term; Franks will be sentenced later.
The other four defendants are Adam Fox, Daniel Harris, Brandon Caserta and Barry Croft Jr. All are Michigan residents except Croft, who is from Delaware.
Eight other men accused of aiding the conspiracy have been charged in state court.
The Wolverine Watchmen are among the small, secretive groups that have appeared in Michigan since the initial burst of paramilitary activism faded, Ali said.
They began recruiting members on Facebook in November 2019 and communicated through an encrypted messaging platform, according to a state police affidavit. It said they held firearms training and tactical drills to prepare for “the boogaloo,“ an anticipated "uprising against the government or impending politically motivated civil war.”
The scheme against Whitmer was hatched the following summer during a meeting at which Watchmen discussed invading the statehouse and using explosives to distract law enforcement, Garbin acknowledged in his plea agreement.
They considered executing the Democratic governor or putting her on trial, eventually deciding to abduct her at her family’s vacation home in northern Michigan, the document said. Informants and undercover agents helped foil the alleged plot.
Vinyard, who attended meetings of self-described militia groups in southeastern Michigan for her research during the 1990s, said threatening language was rare then.
Members had long lists of grievances, some targeting the United Nations and a federal government they believed had exceeded its constitutional authority, she said. But others involved local law enforcement and courts.
“People talked about police harassment, truckers getting stopped by cops, fathers who had not been treated fairly when they got divorced and couldn't see their kids,” she said.
Norman Olson, an Air Force veteran, gun shop owner and Baptist preacher who initially led the Michigan Militia, said then its members were outraged by deadly sieges involving federal agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas.
The militia drew international attention after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, which killed 168 people. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, convicted in the case, had attended meetings in Michigan. Olson said they'd been kicked out for advocating violence.
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