Donald Trump’s ‘brown shirts:’ armed right-wing militia groups

Laura

So you see the not terribly well organized remnants of Laura approaching Pittsburgh from the southwest? It turns out they got swooped up by a low pressure area to the north, blew through Pittsburgh so rapidly as to be imperceptible (figure 1), and the result was a lovely day.
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Fig. 1. 72-hour gif of satellite imagery for eastern Canada, as of August 29, 2020, at 8:01 pm.

Once upon a time, weather forecasting was a hobby I took very seriously, but there’s a reason I stopped calling myself a forecaster a decade or three back. I promise you, I sure didn’t see this coming.


Militia

I would only be going a little beyond an Intercept article in suggesting that armed right-wing militia functionally serve as Donald Trump’s “brown shirts” in a de facto alliance with police. They take their orders as he identifies groups, like Black Lives Matter and (the usually unorganized) Antifa, that allegedly pose a threat to Amerikkka.[1] Hence Kyle Rittenhouse’s shooting of three protesters, killing two, in Kenosha.[2] Some will surely say the arrangement permits Trump plausible deniability.

Ryan Devereaux, “The Thin Blue Line Between Violent, Pro-Trump Militias and Police,” Intercept, August 28, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/08/28/kyle-rittenhouse-violent-pro-trump-militias-police/


Horse race


  1. [1]Ryan Devereaux, “The Thin Blue Line Between Violent, Pro-Trump Militias and Police,” Intercept, August 28, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/08/28/kyle-rittenhouse-violent-pro-trump-militias-police/
  2. [2]Jeremy Stahl, “Kenosha Police Chief Blames Protesters for Their Own Deaths, Defends Vigilante Groups,” Slate, August 26, 2020, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/kenosha-police-chief-daniel-miskinis-blames-protesters-for-own-deaths.html; Ryan Devereaux, “The Thin Blue Line Between Violent, Pro-Trump Militias and Police,” Intercept, August 28, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/08/28/kyle-rittenhouse-violent-pro-trump-militias-police/

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