XPost: us.military.national-guard, alt.revolution.american.second,   
   talk.politics.guns   
   XPost: sac.politics, alt.military   
   From: yourdime@outlook.com   
      
   This image from a YouTube video posted by Chris Arthur on March 20,   
   2018, shows him with a handgun during a training video. Arthur was a   
   member of the North Carolina National Guard at the time he posted the   
   video. (AP Photo)ASSOCIATED PRESS   
      
   MOUNT OLIVE, N.C. (AP) — The U.S. military trained him in explosives   
   and battlefield tactics. Now the Iraq War veteran and enlisted National   
   Guard member was calling for taking up arms against police and   
   government officials in his own country.   
      
   Standing in the North Carolina woods, Chris Arthur warned about a   
   coming civil war. Videos he posted publicly on YouTube bore titles such   
   as “The End of America or the Next Revolutionary War.” In his telling,   
   the U.S. was falling into chaos and there would be only one way to   
   survive: kill or be killed.   
      
   Arthur was posting during a surge of far-right extremism in the years   
   leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He wrote warcraft   
   training manuals to help others organize their own militias. And he   
   offered sessions at his farm in Mount Olive, North Carolina, that   
   taught how to kidnap and attack public officials, use snipers and   
   explosives and design a “fatal funnel” booby trap to inflict mass   
   casualties.   
      
   While he continued to post publicly, military and law enforcement   
   ignored more than a dozen warnings phoned in by Arthur’s wife’s ex-   
   husband about Arthur’s increasingly violent rhetoric and calls for the   
   murder of police officers. This failure by the Guard, FBI and others to   
   act allowed Arthur to continue to manufacture and store explosives   
   around young children and train another extremist who would attack   
   police officers in New York state and lead them on a wild, two-hour   
   chase and gun battle.   
      
   Arthur isn’t an anomaly. He is among more than 480 people with a   
   military background accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes   
   from 2017 through 2023, including the more than 230 arrested in   
   connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection.   
      
   At the same time, while the pace at which the overall population has   
   been radicalizing increased in recent years, people with military   
   backgrounds have been radicalizing at a faster rate. Their extremist   
   plots were also more likely to involve weapons training or firearms   
   than plots that didn’t include someone with a military background,   
   according to an Associated Press analysis of domestic terrorism data   
   obtained exclusively by the AP. This held true whether or not the plots   
   were executed.   
      
   While the number of people involved remains small, the participation of   
   active military and veterans gave extremist plots more potential for   
   mass injury or death, according to data collected and analyzed by the   
   National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to   
   Terrorism, or START, at the University of Maryland. START researchers   
   found that more than 80% of extremists with military backgrounds   
   identified with far-right, anti-government or white supremacist   
   ideologies, with the rest split among far-left, jihadist or other   
   motivations.   
      
   In the shadow of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — led in part by   
   veterans — and a closely contested presidential election, law   
   enforcement officials have said the threat from domestic violent   
   extremists is one of the most persistent and pressing terror threats to   
   the United States. However, despite the increasing participation in   
   extremist activity by those with military experience, there is still no   
   force-wide system to track it. And the AP learned that Defense   
   Department researchers developed a promising approach to detect and   
   monitor extremism that the Pentagon has chosen not to use.   
      
   As part of its investigation, the AP vetted and added to the data and   
   analyses provided by START, and collected thousands of pages of records   
   and hours of audio and video recordings through public records   
   requests.   
      
   Free of scrutiny in Mount Olive, Arthur stockpiled weapons, some with   
   the serial numbers scratched off to make them untraceable. He trained a   
   pack of Doberman pinschers as guard dogs. He rigged his old farmhouse,   
   where he lived with his wife, their three kids and two children from   
   her previous marriage, with improvised explosives, including a bomb   
   hidden on the front porch and wired to a switch inside.   
      
   As early as 2017, his wife’s former husband had reported concerns about   
   his children's safety to military, federal and local authorities,   
   according to call records and police reports.   
      
   All the while, Arthur continued growing his business and connecting   
   with more like-minded individuals.   
      
   In early 2020, a man with a raging hatred for police and an interest in   
   building a militia in Virginia came to the farm, eager to learn.   
      
   A festering problem   
      
   Service members and veterans who radicalize make up a tiny fraction of   
   a percentage point of the millions and millions who have honorably   
   served their country.   
      
   However, when people with military backgrounds “radicalize, they tend   
   to radicalize to the point of mass violence,” said START’s Michael   
   Jensen, who leads the team that has spent years compiling and vetting   
   the dataset.   
      
   His group found that among extremists “the No. 1 predictor of being   
   classified as a mass casualty offender was having a U.S. military   
   background – that outranked mental health problems, that outranked   
   being a loner, that outranked having a previous criminal history or   
   substance abuse issues.”   
      
   The data tracked individuals with military backgrounds, most of whom   
   were veterans, involved in plans to kill, injure or inflict damage for   
   political, social, economic or religious goals. While some violent   
   plots in the data were unsuccessful, those that succeeded killed and   
   hurt dozens of people. Since 2017, nearly 100 people have been killed   
   or injured in these plots, nearly all in service of an anti-government,   
   white supremacist or far-right agenda. Those numbers do not include any   
   of the violence on Jan. 6, which left scores of police officers   
   injured.   
      
   A month after people in tactical gear stormed up the U.S. Capitol steps   
   in military-style stack formation on Jan. 6, the new defense secretary,   
   Lloyd Austin, addressed the long-festering problem. He ordered a force-   
   wide “stand down” to give time to local military commanders to discuss   
   the issue with personnel. He empaneled the Countering Extremist   
   Activity Working Group to study and recommend solutions. Among the   
   group’s eventual recommendations was to clarify what was prohibited   
   under the military’s ban on extremist activity. The revised policy,   
   released in December 2021, now specifies that anti-government or anti-   
   democratic actions are violations of the Uniform Code of Military   
      
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