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Years after being accused of swinging a baseball bat at police officers during the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, Edward “Jake” Lang is now using encrypted messaging channels to create a nationwide network of armed militias in all 50 states.
Though he has been in prison for over 1,200 days, Lang is working with a network of election deniers and conspiracists to promote the North American Patriot and Liberty Militia, or Napalm for short. The group officially launched last week with 50 state-specific militia groups on Telegram.
Lang claims that the Telegram groups already have 20,000 members, including pastors, farmers, former military personnel, and currently serving sheriffs. However, multiple experts who reviewed the channels tell WIRED that figure was wildly overestimated, and that the real figure was closer to 2,500 members. But a group this size, they warn, is still large enough to cause a serious threat. And while unarmed members are welcome, the group is, at its core, a pro-gun organization. “We are pro open carry, pro always have it on you, rather than waiting for somebody else to be able to defend your life,” says Lang.
As the 2024 US election approaches, Lang says that Napalm will be focusing on potential “civil unrest” around the vote. “We have to make sure that we're prepared for any real-time scenarios, any eventualities,“ says Lang. “Civil unrest at any given moment, especially around an election time, is something that could come along, and so we have to plan for that contingency as well.”
Tensions around the November vote are already at an all-time high, and many Republicans refuse to say if they will peacefully accept the outcome of the November election. Over one-third of Americans now baselessly claim that President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 was illegitimate. These conspiracies have led to a resurgence in far-right activity, of which Napalm is just the latest facet: Lang, along with all other members of the group’s leadership council, ardently believes that the 2020 election was stolen from former president Donald Trump.
“We've noted considerable energy being put into resurrecting far-right paramilitary activism right now,” Devin Burghart, the executive director at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR), tells WIRED. “The growing talk of ‘Second Amendment remedies’ to unfavorable electoral outcomes is a serious cause for concern. Militia groups like Napalm promote political violence and sow the seeds for another potential insurrection.”
In addition to the election, Lang says that Napalm will respond to everything from natural disasters to Federal overreach, political protests, and potential Chinese invasions.
“I thought it was necessary to get organized in case these encroachments, these violations of our civil liberties, our natural rights were to escalate to a point where it'd absolutely be untenable and that we would need to defend ourselves.” Lang tells WIRED from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he is awaiting a trial set for September. “There is a tyrannical wave that has hit America that we've never seen before. And so it's time that people get organized in case they escalate to something that basically puts our very lives in danger.”
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Lang, 29, is from upstate New York. He claims to have been an ecommerce entrepreneur and nightclub promoter before getting sober and finding God in late 2020. At the same time, Lang was getting deeper into “truther content” online that claimed Marxists and Communists were ruining the country. This content overlapped with election-denial conspiracies that led to the Capitol riot and inspired Lang to travel to DC.
Days after January 6, Lang was recruiting people into an armed militia on Telegram that would ostensibly fight against the incoming regime of President Biden.
“It was the first battle of the Second American Revolution—make no mistakes,” Lang wrote about the Capitol riot, according to a tranche of thousands of messages obtained by ProPublica. “This is WAR.”
That effort ended days later when Lang was arrested and charged with multiple counts of assaulting law enforcement officers, as well as felony charges of civil disorder and obstruction of an official proceeding—some of which carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
After he was arrested, Lang became a figurehead for January 6 prisoners who have been falsely portrayed as “hostages” or “warriors” by Trump and his supporters. While in prison, Lang has published a book, helped produce several films, hosted his own podcast, and raised millions of dollars for inmates and their families—all related to the January 6 attack.
“It's important to recognize that Lang is, first and foremost, a grifter who knows that his ‘political prisoner’ schtick is his only shot at relevance,” says Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “This is someone who has intentionally delayed his own trial date in an effort to remain in the spotlight and who continues to promote violent conspiracies.”
And though Lang’s original attempt at starting a militia on Telegram ended with just a few hundred followers and his arrest, he says that he has spent the past year creating Napalm from his cell with the help of far-right figures from around the country.
Among those who Lang has convinced to join his initiative is QAnon promoter Ann Vandersteel, who is the groups’ national vice chairman. Former New Mexico county commissioner Couy Griffin, who is known as the leader of Cowboys for Trump, is also on the council. In 2022, Griffin refused to certify the results of a primary election vote.
Stew Peters, who will act as the militia’s national communications director, is a Florida-based antisemitic podcaster who shot to prominence in recent years by pushing Covid conspiracies, including a wild claim that Covid vaccines were derived from snake venom. The claim was so outlandish that even other conspiracy theorists dismissed his claims as “trash.” Peters has also pushed QAnon conspiracies and white supremacist content and even called for the death sentence for the “traitors” that he claimed have stolen the elections.
When the site launched last week, which was first reported by Media Matters, one of those listed as a member of the council was Richard Mack, the founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. When contacted by WIRED, however, Mack said he was not affiliated with the group: “Many groups contact me weekly to work together, but in order for that to happen they must join our mission and philosophy of nonviolence.”
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Lang told WIRED that a member of his team had been speaking to Mack about his role with the group, and it was likely just a miscommunication. Hours later, however, Mack’s picture was removed from the website.
Guns appear to be a central aspect of all actions taken by the Napalm militias, even when responding to incidents like hurricanes, wildfires, or earthquakes. “Even in a natural disaster, people that are in desperate scenarios may do desperate things,” Lang said. “And I believe that open carry and carrying a firearm on your body is a natural right of all men, and it's not something to be shied away from.”
While Lang said non-gun-owners would be welcome to join the group: “They would still be trained, and they would definitely be supported in their eventual path to gun ownership.”
Though Lang says all militia activity to date has occurred online, Napalm plans to get into the real world soon. “We will have casual outings at local firing ranges for downrange training, different exercises on what to do if the power goes out, if the internet is shut down, if the water lines are contaminated, [and] wilderness survival training,” says Lang.
All new members have to go through a vetting process, which consists of a five-minute video call designed to weed out potential infiltration from law enforcement.
Once vetting has been completed, members are then placed in a private county-level chat group where they can communicate with other members of the militia. Neither WIRED nor the researchers we spoke to were able to gain access to the private chats.
In the past, a county-level militia cell structure has made it harder for law enforcement to infiltrate extremist groups.
Lang says the vetting process has been established in part as a response to what happened to militia groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys in the wake of January 6. “They had these public group chats, and people said inflammatory things on there, and so we don't have those,” Lang said.
Though Lang claims that the group has signed up over 20,000 members, some experts don’t believe him.
“The best we can tell is that the numbers that the group is claiming are grossly misleading,” Jared Holt, senior researcher of US hate and extremist movements at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, tells WIRED. “This is an aspirational project. It doesn't reflect any sort of organizing infrastructure that's actively been built. It is being promoted by a group of political hucksters and shock jocks. And I wouldn't be surprised if would-be joiners of these groups come to learn that there is some kind of membership fee, some sort of financial component involved here.”
Burghart and his colleagues at IREHR also reviewed the 50 state-level Telegram channels and found a total of just over 14,000 members. However, Burghart also says that he believes that this figure is “significantly artificially inflated, with real membership closer to 2,500.”
Lang did not respond to questions about whether the Telegram channels membership numbers were artificially inflated.
But even with inflated membership numbers and lack of real-world coordination so far, experts still believe attention needs to be paid to groups like Napalm.
“The promotion of this kind of rhetoric and just mobilizing people around this idea could have reverberating effects,” says Holt. “It certainly heightens the tension of the political environment. It could certainly drive individuals who are maybe suffering some sort of crisis into thinking about more violent action or taking more extreme measures in their anti-government worldviews. And even if one of these states materializes into something with a dozen people in it, that could still cause a real problem.”
Updated: 6/12/2024, 11:23 am EST: This story now references a Media Matters article on the launch of the militia site.
