The alleged bomb plot by militia members in Garden City, Kansas, timed for the day after the election, is a sign of a deepening trend across the United States.
As The Guardian reports,so-called “patriot groups”—extremist militias bent on opposing Democratic rule—have been gaining in popularity and membership since the rise of Donald Trump’s candidacy for president. In fact, the groups actually began to gain traction in the wake of Barack Obama’s election.
Jessica Campbell co-directs the Rural Organizing Project, a not-for-profit group that confronts the right-wing insurgency in rural Oregon and throughout the west. “The Patriot movement is attracting people who feel disenfranchised,” she says. “It’s real out here [in the West], where people feel like they have not been listened to at the state level, and particularly by Democrats.” Campbell regularly receives rape and death threats. She has been shot at, and intruders frequently invade her property. “In rural areas the conditions have been ripe for a white nationalist populist movement,” she says. “The economy’s hurting so badly, and we’ve had decades of scapegoating of people of color as the reason why our economies are so bad.”
