Barbara F. Walter - How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them

Adam Fox flipped over the carpet and opened the trapdoor that led to the basement of the Vac Shack Vacuums shop, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The thirty-seven-year-old had been living underneath the shop with his two dogs after his girlfriend had kicked him out. The owner of the store, a friend, had offered him the space until he could get back on his feet.

The room was a jumble of filing cabinets, dog crates, and vacuum parts. Fox was a frustrated manand not just because he was practically homeless. This wasnt the first time he had been down on his luck. After graduating from high school, hed struggled to find a path, working as a contractor for Vac Shack and barely able to pay his bills. He was angry at the Democratic leaders who had let this happen; he often tweeted about Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi to let off steam. Hed recently found some camaraderie when hed joined a local militia, but then hed been kicked out for his anti-government rants and altercations with other members.

Now COVID-19 was spreading. It had hit Detroit and Grand Rapids so hard that on March 23, 2020, Michigans governor, Gretchen Whitmer, had called for a state lockdown. Her stay-at-home orders extended even to rural areas with few cases. In late Aprilafter yet another round of restrictionsFox had donned a baseball cap and tactical vest to join hundreds of protesters, many of them armed, to march on the capitol in Lansing. Hed listened outside as Mike Detmer, a Republican congressional candidate, railed against the restrictions as un-American. We are in a war for the hearts, the soul, the traditions, and the freedom of our state and country, Detmer had declared. It is up to us to end the shutdown. Afterward, when protesters forced themselves into the capitol to occupy the House floor, Fox had joined them.

But none of this had really changed things, and as more weeks went by, Fox grew restless. That June, he livestreamed a video on Facebook, complaining about recent gym closures and calling Whitmer a tyrant bitch who loved power. I dont know, boys. We gotta do something, he said into the camera. Soon afterward, he reached out over Facebook to Joseph Morrison, the leader of a local militia, the Wolverine Watchmen. Morrison allegedly agreed to help Fox recruit, train, and arm a new paramilitary group. Soon Fox was gathering other men to his cause. One who joined was a retired rifleman in the Marine Corps who had won the Humanitarian Service Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, and the Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal. Another had previously started basic training with the Michigan National Guard but had not completed it. One was affiliated with the Three Percenters militia group; another supported QAnon; another followed the social media accounts of the Proud Boys.

There were fourteen of them. Many of the men, like Fox, had attended anti-lockdown rallies. They began meeting in the basement of Vac Shack, where Fox would confiscate cellphones so no one could record the conversations. They also met on Morrisons one-acre rural property for tactical and firearms training. Every Sunday afternoon they would fire hundreds of rounds and practice building explosives.

They considered storming the state capitolthey could take lawmakers hostage, then execute them over the course of a few days. They also considered locking the doors of the capitol and setting the building on fire with everyone inside. Eventually, because the capitol was so well protected, they settled on a different plan: kidnap Whitmer at her vacation home in northern Michigan sometime before the November 2020 election. They would take her to a hidden place in Wisconsin, put her on trial for treason, and kill her.

That August and September, the men spied on Whitmers home, looking for a nearby bridge to detonate as a way to distract law enforcement agents when they launched their plan. But the FBI was on to them. After discovering the groups activity on social media in early 2020, agents had infiltrated the group online and recruited informants who agreed to wear a wire or gather information. By September, despite Foxs precautions, the FBI had gathered more than thirteen thousand pages of encrypted text messages, as well as photographs, videos, and more than one hundred hours of audio evidence of the kidnapping plot. On the night of October 7, 2020, the feds closed in with a sting: When a handful of the plotters met for what they thought was a weapons buy, they were arrested instead. The FBI raided the Vac Shack basement and executed search warrants in more than a dozen locations. The fourteen men, including Fox, were slapped with terrorism, conspiracy, and weapons charges. The owner of Vac Shack, meanwhile, grappled with his disbelief. I knew he was in a militia, he told reporters, but theres a lot of people in a militia that dont plan to kidnap the governor. I mean, give me a break.

In the wake of the arrests, news reports focused on the true aims of the would-be kidnappers. Even though Michigan leaders, both Democrat and Republican, condemned the plot, President Donald Trump criticized Whitmer, tweeting that she had done a terrible job as governor. Fox himself, however, left no doubt about the groups motives. The trial and execution of Whitmer, hed explained in FBI recordings, were designed to inspire others to carry out similar attacks. The time had come for a revolution, and he and his men would provoke a societal collapse. I just wanna make the world glow, dude, he told an informant. Thats what its gonna take for us to take it back.

WHEN I FIRST read about the plot to kidnap Whitmer in the fall of 2020, I was alarmed but not altogether surprised. It fit into a pattern I had been writing and thinking about for decades. There have been hundreds of civil wars over the past seventy-five years, and many of them started in an eerily similar way. As a scholar and an expert on civil wars, I have interviewed members of Hamas in the West Bank, exSinn Fin members in Northern Ireland, and former members of FARC in Colombia. I have stood on top of the Golan Heights and stared into Syria during the height of the Syria civil war. I have driven across Zimbabwe as the military was planning its coup against Robert Mugabe. I have been followed and interrogated by members of Myanmars junta. Ive been at the wrong end of an Israeli soldiers machine gun.