MILLIONS OF ANGRY, ARMED AMERICANS STAND READY TO SEIZE POWER IF TRUMP IS DEFRAUDED OR BARRED FROM THE 2024 ELECTION.

By Newsweek - DAVID H. FREEDMAN 12/20/21 KL. 05:00 AM EST

Mike "Wompus" Nieznany is a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran who walks with a cane from combat wounds he received during his service. This disability doesn't stop Nieznany from making a living selling custom motorcycle luggage racks from his home in Gainesville, Georgia. Nor will it slow him down when it's time to visit Washington, DC - heavily armed and ready to do his part in overthrowing the US government.

Millions of other potential rebels will also be there, says Nieznany, "a ticking time bomb" aimed at the Capitol. "There are a lot of fully armed people wondering what is happening to this country," he says. "Are we going to let Biden keep destroying it? Or are we going to get rid of him? We're only going to take so much before we fight back." The election in 2024, he adds, may well be the trigger.

Nieznany is not a loner. His political commentary on social media Quora received 44,000 views in the first two weeks of November and more than 4 million in total. He is one of many rank-and-file Republicans who own guns and in recent months have spoken openly about the need to take down — by force if necessary — a federal government they see as illegitimate, overreaching, and corrosive of American freedom.

The phenomenon goes far beyond the growth of militias, which have been a feature of American life at least since the Ku Klux Klan came to power after the Civil War. Groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, which participated in the January 6 riot at the Capitol and may have played organizational roles, have grown in membership. Law enforcement has long tracked and often infiltrated these groups.

What Nieznany represents is something else entirely: a much larger and more diffuse movement of more or less ordinary people, fueled by misinformation, knit together by social media, and well-armed. In 2020, 17 million Americans bought 40 million guns and in 2021 were on track to add another 20 million. If historical trends hold, buyers will be overwhelmingly white, Republican, and southern or rural.

America's massive and mostly Republican gun rights movement matches a growing belief among many Republicans that the federal government is an illegitimate tyranny that must be overthrown by any means necessary. The combustible formula raises the threat of large-scale armed attacks around the 2024 presidential election — attacks that could make the January 6 uprising look like a toothless stunt by comparison.

"The idea that people would take up arms against an American election has gone from being completely far-fetched to something that we have to start planning for and preparing for," said University of California, Los Angeles law professor Adam Winkler, an expert on gun policy and constitutional. law.

Both Democrats and Republicans are rapidly losing faith in the integrity of American elections. Democrats worry that voter suppression and election interference by Republican state officials will deny millions of Americans the chance to vote at the polls. A PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll in early November reported that 55 percent of Democrats saw voter suppression as the biggest threat to American elections.

Republicans claim, against the evidence, that Democrats have already manipulated vote counts through fraud to steal a presidential election. A CNN poll in October found that more than three-quarters of Republicans mistakenly believe Joe Biden's 2020 election victory was fraudulent.

According to the Constitution, Congress and the Supreme Court are supposed to decide such dueling claims. Given the increasing intensity and polarization of political life, would either side accept a decision that left a disputed 2024 election outcome to the other?

Such a decision would more likely bring tens of millions of protesters and counter-protesters into the streets, especially around the US capital and possibly many state capitals, and plunge the country into chaos. While many Democrats may be inclined to demonstrate, a larger percentage of Republican protesters would almost certainly carry guns.

If the Supreme Court ruling, expected in mid-2022, on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen establishes an unrestricted right to carry a handgun anywhere in the country, it may be perfectly legal to bring firearms to the Capitol in Washington, DC. Winkler says, "The Supreme Court may be close to issuing the ruling that brings down the American government."

If armed violence breaks out in the 2024 election, it may fall on the US military, which may be reluctant to take up arms against US citizens. If so, the fate of the nation may be decided by a single fact: a large subset of one of the two parties has for years armed itself for this reason.

"I hope it's just too crazy to happen here," said Erica De Bruin, an assistant professor of government at Hamilton College who studies coups around the world. "But it's now in the realm of the plausible."

Enemy at the gates

Many Republicans increasingly see themselves less as citizens represented by the federal government and more as tyrannized victims of that government. More than three-quarters of Republicans reported "low trust" in the federal government in a national poll by Grinnell College in October; only a minority of Democrats agreed. From this point of view, peaceful elections will not save the day. More than two in three Republicans believe democracy is under attack, according to the Grinnell poll, which echoes the results of a CNN poll in September. Half as many Democrats say the same.

Mainstream news publications are filled with howls of protest over political abuses by Republican leaders, reflecting the beliefs of the party's mainstream. But the small newspapers in the rural, red states that are the core of the Republican Party congregation give voice to a simpler picture: Politics is dead; it's time to fight.

"Wake up America!" reads a September opinion piece urging Democrats in The Gaston Gazette, based in Gastonia, NC "The enemy is at our gates, God willing it is not too late to turn the rushing tide of this dark regime." The play goes on to quote Thomas Paine's call to colonists to take up arms against the British. "We are in a civil war," a letter published in September in The New Mexico Sun also warns Republicans,

Evidence that a significant proportion of Republicans will increasingly resort to violence against the government and political opponents is growing. More than 100 violent threats, many of them death threats, were directed at poll workers and election officials in battleground states in 2020, according to a Reuters investigation published in September — all of the threat companies contacted by Reuters identified as Trump supporters.

In October 2020, 13 men were charged with plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat; all of them were aligned with the political right. Nearly a third of Republicans agree that "true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save our country," according to a September poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group.

Weapons are becoming an important part of the equation. "Americans are increasingly using guns in public spaces, spurred on by people they oppose politically or public decisions with which they disagree," concludes an August article in the Northwestern University Law Review. Guns abounded when hundreds of anti-COVID prevention protesters gathered at the Michigan State Capitol in May 2020. Some of the armed protesters tried to enter the Capitol chamber.

Those who carry weapons to a political protest may in theory have peaceful intentions, but there is good reason to believe otherwise. An October study by Everytown for Gun Safety and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) looked at 560 protests involving armed participants over an 18-month period through mid-2021 and found that a sixth of them turned violent, and some involved deaths.

An indication of the lengths to which Republicans may be willing to go in opposing the authorities with violence is their sanguine response to the January 6 riot in the US capital. Republicans, by and large, see no problem with a mob of hundreds swarming and forcing their way into the seat of American government.

Half of Republicans said the mob was "defending freedom," according to a CBS/YouGov poll taken soon after the riot. Today, two-thirds of Republicans have denied there was an attack at all, according to an October Quinnipiac University poll. "There has been little accountability for that rebellion," says UCLA's Winkler. "The right-wing rhetoric has only gotten worse since then."

Most Republican leaders are cautious about supporting violence against the government, but not all. Former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a controversial figure who remains popular with many Republicans, reportedly told an enthusiastic gathering of Trump supporters in October that if and when a "serious" insurgency emerges, "there's very little you will be able" to do with it."

Former army generals fear rebellion or "civil war" in 2024

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, another prominent Republican popular with the rank and file, believed that the January 6 rioters were simply doing what the Declaration of Independence tells true patriots to do, in that they were trying to "overthrow tyrants". The real threat to democracy, she added, is Black Lives Matter protesters and Democratic "Marxist-Communist" agents. Greene and Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Republican from North Carolina, have referred to some of the rioters as "political prisoners."

Trump himself, of course, has fostered a constant undercurrent of violence among his supporters from the beginning of his first presidential campaign. In 2016, he publicly stated that he could shoot someone in the street without losing any of his political support, and he went on to encourage attendees at his rallies to attack protesters and journalists.

When protesters at a rally in Miami were dragged away, Trump warned that next time "I'm going to be a little more violent." At a rally in Las Vegas in 2016, he openly complained to the crowd that security wasn't tough enough on a protester they were removing. "I'd like to punch him in the face, I'll tell you that," he said.

Today, Trump openly declares that the rebels on January 6 are "great people". In October, he suggested that Republicans might not bother to vote in the 2022 or 2024 elections because of their concerns about fraud in the 2020 election. At the same time, he declared that he would achieve an "even more glorious victory in November 2024". The notion that Republicans can turn their backs on the ballot box while celebrating Trump only makes sense if Trump envisions a path to power that doesn't require votes.

Republicans approve of that kind of talk. The Quinnipiac poll in October found that while 94 percent of Democrats insist Trump undermines democracy, 85 percent of Republicans say he protects it.

Where the weapons are

In his acclaimed history of the early days of the American Revolution, "The British Are Coming," author Rick Atkinson explains a major reason why America became the first British colony to succeed in winning freedom where others had failed. "Unlike the Irish and other subjugated peoples," he writes, "the Americans were heavily armed."

Muskets, he points out, were "as common as kettles" among the colonists, and American sharpshooters were among the best marksmen in the world. That possession of and skill with arms, combined with the colonists' deep passion to rid themselves of what they saw as government tyranny, would help carry the day against otherwise long odds.

Today, the many Republicans who have convinced themselves that they too must throw off a tyrannical government have many weapons. Americans own around 400 million guns, according to the Switzerland-based Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. (The US government does not track gun ownership.) The vast majority of these guns belong to Republicans.

Gallup found that half of all Republicans own guns, nearly three times the rate of gun ownership among Democrats. Gun owners are overwhelmingly male and white, and more likely to live in the rural South than anywhere else. These demographics fit in well with the die-hard segment of the Republican Party.

Arms sales have increased dramatically in the last two years. About 17 million people, or more than six percent of the population, bought 40 million guns in 2020 alone, according to research from Harvard and Northeastern Universities. Sales for 2021 are on track to add another 20 million to the total, according to gun industry research firm Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting.

Although there is data that suggests Democrats are increasing their modest share of gun purchases, recent history suggests that the vast majority of those guns are going to Republicans. According to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, Republicans and independent Republicans were more than twice as likely to own a gun as their Democratic counterparts.

Former Iowa Representative Steve King, long known as someone who is not afraid to say out loud what many other Republicans are thinking, is convinced that his party is better armed. "People keep talking about another civil war," he wrote on Facebook in 2019. "One side has about 8 trillion bullets... Wonder who would win?"

Ecstatic Donald Trump fans retweeted his call for "Wild" protests

The impulse for violent insurgency among Republicans derives some of its energy from the mostly Republican gun rights movement, and vice versa. It is a relatively new phenomenon. The right to own guns was long a passionate issue for conservatives, without ever posing much of an apparent threat to democracy. But that is changing fast.

In 2000, 60 percent of gun owners cited hunting as the reason they bought guns, according to a Gallup poll. Many of the rest listed "sports", which usually means target shooting. But by 2016, 63 percent said they bought guns for self-defense. This shift was caused by growing paranoia about street crime and mob violence, a fear constantly pumped up by Fox and other right-wing media outlets, which have long conjured up the notion that urban gangs and other troublemakers are increasingly running free through the suburbs and beyond.

Over the past four years, these fears have blurred into anti-government, pro-Trump, and in some cases white supremacist movements. "We've seen the flowering of a different view of gun rights, one that focuses on the necessity of owning guns to fight a tyrannical government," says Winkler. "The promotion of that idea has made it all the more likely that some people will come to see the government as a tyrannical one that must be overthrown." The resulting gun-rights-driven, anti-deep-state radicalism echoes throughout Republican-heavy social media and other communication channels.

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The gun industry did not create that conflation of gun ownership and impending patriotic armed insurrection, but it has reinforced it. A 2020 article on the website of AZ Big Media, Arizona's largest publisher of business news, advised readers this way: "If you've been waiting to buy that firearm you've been eyeing for a while, now is the time. Don't. Wait until the presidential election. We don't know what's going to happen, but regardless of who is elected to office, the chaos and violence will likely grow."

Palmetto State Armory, a gun parts manufacturer and gun dealer from Columbia, South Carolina, puts it this way on its website: "Our mission is to maximize freedom, not our profits. We want to sell as many AR-15 and AK-47 rifles as we can and bring them into common use in America today," adding that doing so "safeguards the rights of the people against tyranny." A 2019 Drew University study noted that one in four of gun manufacturers' most-viewed YouTube videos invoked patriotism. "It's a commercial interest that gives the feeling of needing guns to defend against the government," says Risa Brooks, a political scientist at Marquette University.

The National Rifle Association played a major role in pumping up the "own guns to protect America from leftist tyranny" theme. "If the violent left brings its terror to our communities, our neighborhoods, or into our homes, they will be met with the determination and the strength and the full force of American freedom in the hands of the American people," said NRA CEO Wayne. LaPierre in 2017. That same year, an NRA spokesperson railed against Trump's opponents, adding, “The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth .” There wasn't much question of what that fist would connect.

The NRA also advanced the notion that gun control policies enacted by Nazis targeting Jews were a critical enabling element of the Holocaust. That claim has been thoroughly debunked by historians, but Ben Carson, Trump's secretary of housing and urban development, linked public gun control to the Holocaust. Texas Senator Ted Cruz has also explicitly linked gun rights to fending off federal threats, stating that guns "serve as the ultimate check against state tyranny." Trump himself hinted at the darkest connection between gun ownership and taking down a Democrat-led government, suggesting during his first presidential campaign that the "Second Amendment people" might be able to stop Hillary Clinton if she won.

How it can go down

What could lead to large-scale armed threats or even violence around the 2024 elections? There can be only one narrow way to avoid it: a comfortable, undisputed victory by Trump, assuming he is the Republican nominee. Democrats may despair over the loss, but they are unlikely to engage in mass protests against what could be seen as a legitimate electoral victory.

But if Trump loses, by any margin, and is unable to overturn the results through legal or political means, it seems likely that Republicans will declare the election fraudulent. In 2020, the conviction – against all evidence – that Trump had the presidency stolen from him brought a riotous mob to the US capital. The mob was largely unarmed, no doubt thanks to Washington DC's strict gun control laws.

By 2024, that kind of mob, which will have been fed for four years on false claims of a "Big Steal" and calls to fight back against tyranny, is likely to be far, far bigger. If gun control laws are weakened by the Supreme Court, they are likely to be heavily armed as well. In addition to Washington, DC, the ACLED report found that Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Oregon face the greatest risk of armed insurgency in contested elections, followed by North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, California, and New Mexico. But shortly after the Jan. 6 uprising, the FBI warned that all 50 state capitals were at risk. "There has been a recent and worrying attempt to frame showing up with guns as an appropriate way to challenge an election result you don't like," says Marquette's Brooks.

If Trump wins, but by a small margin that Democrats can attribute to Republican laws and tactics aimed at suppressing Democratic votes, massive protests around the country are inevitable. Democrats don't have to stretch the imagination to make that claim: In 2021, 43 states proposed more than 250 laws restricting voting access. Georgia cut the number of ballot boxes, a practice almost always aimed at communities with high percentages of minority residents. Iowa closed most early voting. Arkansas increased its voter ID requirement. And Utah made it easier to selectively purge voters from the rolls.

If Trump loses votes, but the loss is overturned by the actions of partisan election officials, lawmakers or governors in key battleground states, and that reversal is protected by a Republican Congress or Supreme Court, protests are again inevitable. And again, that kind of reversal is far from unlikely: There are 23 states where Republicans control both the legislature and the governorship, including several of the battleground states. In 2022, Republicans stand to gain control of three more key states - Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Any state controlled by one party is in a good position to try to overturn an electoral vote, as Trump and many Republicans urged state officials to do in 2020. "We've seen a trend of Republican governors and legislators appointing party officials who are more willing to claim voter fraud, giving themselves more power to subvert elections at the local level," says Hamilton College's De Bruin. For these and other reasons, America has steadily fallen in the much-cited Freedom in the World ranking of countries according to how democratic they are The USA has fallen from the company of large, Western European countries to end up today alongside Ghana and Mongolia.

Whatever circumstances might lead to major protests by Democrats in 2024, their presence on the streets could bring out armed Republican counter-protesters bent on protecting Trump's nominal victory and, in their minds, defending democracy against left-wing mobs. "There's a reasonable concern that if Trump asked them to come out and quell the mob, they might respond," said Lindsay Cohn, associate professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College.

Nieznany, the Vietnam vet, insists that if pro-democracy protests include violence, as was the case with several Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 in largely isolated cases, right-wing counter-protesters would be justified in shooting. "Rocks, bottles, and bricks can kill you as fast as a bullet will," he says. That's the kind of logic that in August 2020 brought Kyle Rittenhouse and his AR-15-style rifle to a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he shot three protesters, killing two, claiming self-defense. A jury acquitted him of all charges.

Based on their actions at protests in recent years, police forces can count on a strong response – against the pro-democracy protesters, that is. ACLED found that police used force in Black Lives Matter protests more than half the time, but only a third of the time at right-wing demonstrations. In any case, few police forces are prepared to effectively deal with tens of thousands of armed protesters.

Enter the military

If the police cannot or will not handle an armed rebellion, the last hope for a peaceful solution will probably be the National Guard and the military. Only the governor can call out the National Guard in a state, and only the president can deploy the military. To send in the military to quell disturbances on US soil, the president must invoke the Insurrection Act, last used in 1992 by then-President George HW Bush to help restore order during riots in Los Angeles.

Joe Biden would likely still be president at the initiation of election-related violence, so if the National Guard was unable to calm things down in one or more states — or if a governor refused to call in the Guard — it would fall squarely on Biden's shoulders to ring. He would not need any government cooperation to do so. "That would be a perfectly legitimate role for the U.S. military under these circumstances," said Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

The National Guard or the military would almost certainly prevail in shutting down the worst violence and protecting the government. But two key questions arise: Would military leadership accept Biden's order to deploy against an armed insurgency? And if it did, would the congregation follow its commanding orders to take up arms against other Americans whose motivations might resonate with many of their own?

The military leadership is still chastened by the outcry after General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accompanied Trump to a photo op over a Lafayette Square forcibly cleared of peaceful protesters in June 2020, Brooks says. "They're going to be reluctant to engage," she says. "The military takes an oath to the Constitution, not to a particular president." Biden will also probably see calling in the military as a last resort, she adds. But if the situation is serious, and Biden seems justified in calling, management will comply, regardless of concerns, she says.

As for the possibility that Guard or military leaders might refuse to follow orders to take up arms against armed Trump supporters, the Naval War College's Cohn considers that unlikely. "There's not a ton of evidence that the rank and file are solidly behind Trump," she says. "But whatever they think, they are very professional. No more than a small percentage would refuse."

She points out that Trump worked hard to align himself with the rank and file, even as he distanced himself from military leadership. And yet there was little sign of overt support from the rank-and-file when Trump tried to whip up mobs in January to support his baseless claims of voter fraud — even though former Trump national security adviser and retired Army general Michael Flynn was the same way. the time that openly calls for the military to take control of the government.

Without a strong response from a combination of the police, National Guard and military, it is easy to see how the Republicans would be able to take control of the country simply by virtue of their vast arsenal. "Both sides may be equally convinced of the illegitimacy of the other's actions," says Winkler. "What is asymmetric is the ability to inflict violence."

Let's hope it doesn't come to that, and that there is a relatively peaceful resolution to what is likely to be a contentious, hotly-contested election. But that result is not guaranteed. And even if a conflict ends quietly before it gets too far, experiencing a near miss can make our already fragile democracy more weakened and vulnerable. It is difficult to say what will be needed to repair it.

Nieznany can speak for millions when he insists it is too late. "There are too many of us who are ready to give our lives to take the country back," he says. "We need a civil war."