April 14, 2016
THE FACE OF TERRORISM:
Friendly Fire in the American Patriot Death Cult (Brendan O'Connor, 4/14/16, Gawker)One afternoon in early January, just outside the small, north Texas town of Pottsboro, Vincent Smith shot and killed his friend, Charles Carter, who was drunk. The two were members of the American patriot movement, and they had been organizing, through Facebook, a march of gun rights evangelists on Washington. According to those who knew him, just before he was killed, Carter was expressing an interest in acquiring the makings of a bomb. The march imploded, just feet from where it began, before it ever got on the road. [...]
About three years ago, Sulser said, Carter started getting involved with a local patriot group--a branch of the Three Percenters, a paramilitary group that advocates armed resistance to gun control. [...]
(The Three Percenters group, however, is decentralized and its adherents are unpredictable. Last fall, a man affiliated with the group opened fire on a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Minneapolis, wounding five. In 2011, four self-described "militiamen" were arrested and charged with planning to purchase explosives and the biological toxin ricin in a plot to attack American citizens and government officials in Atlanta, Georgia, inspired by a book written by the Three Pecenter's founder Mike Vanderboegh, who later ridiculed their plans.)
Carter's own political beliefs were based in two foundational texts: The Bible, and the Constitution. "He believed in the law of the land--the original Constitution, not all these new laws that Obama's passing and everything else. Letting in these refugees and paying them all this money to come and live here," Sulser said. "Obama makes his own laws. Those aren't laws that you actually have to abide by. Charles didn't like those laws."
Posted by Orrin Judd at April 14, 2016 1:53 PM