The number of U.S. service members and veterans who radicalize make up a tiny fraction of a percentage point of the millions and millions who have honorably served their country
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.
In messages to AP from a federal prison in Tennessee, he said he is a target of “political warfare.”
“I’m a political prisoner,” he wrote, echoing the language former President Donald Trump and others have used to minimize the crimes committed in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
In Arthur’s view, the imprisonment of “vets and patriots” like himself and the attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania prophesy the civil war he has long argued is coming.
“This is happening,” he wrote. “All the signs are there.”
At the same time, while the pace at which the overall population has been radicalizing increased in recent years, people with military backgrounds have been radicalizing at a faster rate.
While the number of people involved remains small, the participation of active military and veterans gave extremist plots more potential for mass injury or death, according to data collected and analyzed by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, at the University of Maryland. START researchers found that more than 80% of extremists with military backgrounds identified with far-right, anti-government or white supremacist ideologies, with the rest split among far-left, jihadist or other motivations.
As part of its investigation, the AP vetted and added to the data and analyses provided by START, and collected thousands of pages of records and hours of audio and video recordings through public records requests.