Standing in the North Carolina woods, Chris Arthur warned about a coming civil war. Videos he posted publicly on YouTube bore titles such as “The End of America or the Next Revolutionary War.” In his telling, the U.S. was falling into chaos and there would be only one way to survive: kill or be killed.
Arthur was posting during a surge of far-right extremism in the years leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He wrote warcraft training manuals to help others organize their own militias. And he offered sessions at his farm in Mount Olive, North Carolina, that taught how to kidnap and attack public officials, use snipers and explosives and design a “fatal funnel” booby trap to inflict mass casualties.
While he continued to post publicly, military and law enforcement ignored more than a dozen warnings phoned in by Arthur’s wife’s ex-husband about Arthur’s increasingly violent rhetoric and calls for the murder of police officers. This failure by the Guard, FBI and others to act allowed Arthur to continue to manufacture and store explosives around young children and train another extremist who would attack police officers in New York state and lead them on a wild, two-hour chase and gun battle.
Arthur isn’t an anomaly. He is among more than 480 people with a military background accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes from 2017 through 2023, including the more than 230 arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Bolding added, archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/OOU0a
e; added a final period to the AP’s headline because it looks weird without one
I do not think violence would disappear if there were no politics. Judging from archaeological evidence, people have been engaging in violence since before the agricultural revolution.
We choose to try to make politics nonviolent. It’s an aspirational goal to move in a different direction and attempt a different method from the past several millennia. Even this will not make crime and war go away, though, until we can adequately address things like sociopathy, fear and resource scarcity. And even like, romantic envy can be an instigator for violence.