January 6 rioter is leading an armed national militia from prison

Lang told WIRED that a member of his team was talking to Mack about his role in the group, and that it was likely just a misunderstanding. However, a few hours later, Mack’s photo was removed from the website.

Guns seem to be a central aspect of all actions taken by napalm militias, even when responding to events such as hurricanes, wildfires or earthquakes. “Even in a natural disaster, people who are in desperate scenarios can do desperate things,” Lang said. “And I believe that openly carrying weapons and having a gun on your person is a natural right of all men, and it’s not something that should be shied away from.”

While Lang said non-gun owners would be welcome to join the group: “They will still be trained, and of course they will be supported in their eventual path to gun ownership.”

Although Lang says all militia activities to date have taken place online, Napalm plans to venture into the real world soon. “We’ll do casual outings to local firing ranges for casual training, do different exercises on what to do if the power goes out, what to do if the internet goes down, what to do if water lines are contaminated, [and] wilderness survival training,” Lang says.

All new members are required to undergo a vetting process, which includes a five-minute video call, designed to prevent potential intrusions from law enforcement agencies.

Once the investigation is complete, members are placed in a private county-level chat group where they can communicate with other militia members. Neither WIRED nor the researchers we spoke to were able to access the private chat.

In the past, a county-level militia cell structure It has made it more difficult Preventing law enforcement agencies from infiltrating extremist groups.

Lang says the vetting process was set up partly as a response to what happened with militia groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys after January 6. “They had public group chats, and people said inflammatory things there, and so we don’t have those,” Lang said.

Although Lang claims that the group has more than 20,000 members, some experts do not believe him.

“The best we can tell is that the numbers being reported by the group are completely misleading,” Jared Holt, senior researcher on U.S. hate and extremist movements at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told WIRED. “This is an ambitious project. It doesn’t reflect any kind of organized infrastructure that’s been actively built. It’s being promoted by a group of political hoaxers and shock jocks. And I wouldn’t be surprised if people who join these groups know that there’s some kind of membership fee, some kind of financial component involved.”

Burghardt and his colleagues at IREHR also reviewed 50 state-level Telegram channels and found that they had more than 14,000 members in total. However, Burghardt also says he believes this figure is “largely artificially inflated, with the actual number of members closer to 2,500.”

Lang did not answer a question about whether the subscription numbers of Telegram channels were artificially inflated.

But despite the inflated membership numbers so far and the lack of real-world coordination, experts still believe groups like NEPAM need attention.

“Promoting this kind of rhetoric and organizing people around this idea can have far-reaching effects,” Holt says. “It certainly increases tensions in the political climate. It certainly can motivate individuals who are maybe going through some kind of crisis and thinking about taking more violent action or more extreme measures in their anti-government worldview. And even if something happens to a dozen people in one of these states, it can still cause a real problem.”

Update: 6/12/2024, 11:23am EST: This story now references a Media Matters article on the launch of the militia site.