An inside look at the almost unbelievable plot by militia to kidnap Gov. Whitmer and to overthrow the state government.
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🚓 13 charged in plot to kidnap Whitmer: More than a dozen people are accused of participating in what the FBI is calling a “violent” militia scheme involving people from several different states to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as a hostage and overthrow the Michigan government. More on this here and below.
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🏊 Morning Dive
Good morning and Happy Friday.
In my news career, there are a handful of stories I can look back on and remember exactly what I was doing when we got the news. The 2018 meteor that lit up the sky. The tragic untimely death of Prince. And another one, that happened on Thursday.
More than a dozen people are accused of participating in what the FBI is calling a “violent” militia scheme involving people from several different states to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as a hostage and overthrow the Michigan government.
The story is absolutely incredible, terrifying, disturbing and frankly, disgusting.
Five Michigan residents -- Adam Fox, Ty Garbin, Kaleb Franks, Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta -- and Barry Croft, of Delaware, have been charged with conspiring to kidnap Whitmer. Attorney General Dana Nessel issued charges against seven others.
The plot involved months of planning that included “snatching” Whitmer from her vacation home and taking her to Wisconsin to “put her on trial” for treason. The leader of the plot inspected a bridge for where to plant explosives so the group could delay police response to the kidnapping scene, FBI agents said.
There are so many details to this story, and we’ve spent hours combing through federal and state documents to gather all of the information.
Read here: Deep dive into the details of a scheme to kidnap Gov. Whitmer, hold her hostage
Some quick militia history
We hear this term a lot these days, but it doesn’t mean what it used to mean.
Militias date back thousands of years. It’s an ancient idea. The basic definition of a militia is a “military organization of citizens with limited military training, which is available for emergency service, usually for local defense.”
In Michigan, predating the Michigan National Guard (active since 1862), the Michigan Territory Militia existed from 1805 to 1837.
The first indication of an effort to organize a militia is the reference in the Cadillac Papers of a proposal made by Sr. de LaMothe. His proposal, dated November 13, 1708, called for forming four companies of “savages” to act as a militia for the colony. People opposed this idea because they were afraid that if the “savages” became educated in the ways of warfare, they would become formidable.
The first evidence of an organized, formal militia is the mention of the participation of the First Regiment of Wayne County in a parade in Detroit on May 11, 1803.
On June 30, 1805, the act organizing the Territory of Michigan took effect, with General William Hull as the first Governor. Although the act provided for the creation of a militia consisting of 18- to 45-year-old males, organization never proceeded further than being placed on paper.
Militias played important roles in the Revolutionary War, War of 1812 and the Civil War. After the Civil War, secret groups like the Ku Klux Klan grew in the south and spawned private militias, or “paramilitary” organizations who used violence and and intimidation to push out lawmakers or suppress voting access. The definition and authority of militias gets pretty murky after this point.
In modern history, militia are made up of groups who are anti-government, conspiracy-theory inspired, and right-wing. The modern day origins can be traced back to 1993, following the deadly standoff in Waco, Texas. Militia groups have had their hands on tragic events, like the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing (Timothy McVeigh attended Michigan Militia meetings). Read more about the militia movement and its history here from U-M.
🗞️ Some other headlines:
Elsewhere (AP): Hurricane Delta, gaining strength as it bears down on the U.S. Gulf Coast, is the latest and nastiest in a recent flurry of rapidly intensifying Atlantic hurricanes that scientists largely blame on global warming.
Earlier, before hitting Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and temporarily losing strength, Delta set a record for going from a 35 mph (56 kph) unnamed tropical depression to a monstrous 140 mph (225 kph) Category 4 storm in just 36 hours, beating a mark set in 2000, according to University of Colorado weather data scientist Sam Lillo.
“We’ve certainly been seeing a lot of that in the last few years,” said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate and hurricane scientist Jim Kossin. “It’s more likely that a storm will rapidly intensify now than it did in the 1980s ... A lot of that has to do with human-caused climate change.”
Over the past couple decades, meteorologists have been increasingly worried about storms that just blow up from nothing to a whopper, just like Delta. They created an official threshold for this dangerous rapid intensification — a storm gaining 35 mph (56 kph) in wind speed in just 24 hours.
Delta is the sixth storm this year and the second in a week to reach the threshold, Lillo calculated.
Hurricanes Hannah, Laura, Sally and Teddy and tropical storm Gamma all gained at least 35 mph (56 kph) in strength in 24 hours. And a seventh storm, Marco, just missed the mark. Laura, which jumped 65 mph (105 kph) in the day before landfall, tied the record for the biggest rapid intensification in the Gulf of Mexico, said former hurricane hunter meteorologist Jeff Masters. (Keep reading: Experts: Warming makes Delta, other storms power up faster)
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