The Three Percenters (APIII) Movement: We Need to Be Strong Lions in a Militia World After Trump’s Assassination
According to information shared exclusively with WIRED, in the past year the tech firm has made a significant recruitment push on major social media platforms. Despite featuring “Three Percenters” in its name—a clear nod to the militia movement—APIII touts a disclaimer on its website insisting that it is not a militia. It is in line with the broader trend that has seen paramilitary activists distance themselves from the militias in the aftermath of the Capitol riot.
Since January 6, this type of rhetoric has been commonplace, says the director of the tech transparency project. But she’s particularly concerned about the heightened rhetoric in tandem with aggressive recruitment efforts by militia groups, who historically have opportunistically pounced on moments of national chaos to encourage organizing and training. Paul says the combination of militia activity and heightened rhetoric could inspire individuals who are susceptible to online influence and accelerate to act on their own. She also sees militias’ emphasis on organization over knee-jerk calls for retaliatory violence as a sign that the movement is focused on long-term goals and growth.
In the aftermath of the shooting at Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—which left the former president wounded in his ear, one person dead, and two people injured—incendiary rhetoric and calls for retaliatory violence exploded online.
Seddon goes on in the video to say that he’s looking at coordinating a meeting with other militias around Pennsylvania. It’s not going to be gone in a day. We need to become strong lions, says the man. “Start reaching out to individuals in your state that are trustworthy, that have the like-minded vision of local strong communities, to hold down the fort, just in case [of] war, or for when shit hits the fan.”
The attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump has given rise to militia and anti-government groups across the United States.
“An attack on President Trump was an attack on us, people like us—like-minded American patriots,” says Scot Seddon, the Pennsylvania-based founder of the American Patriots Three Percenters (APIII), in a video posted to TikTok on Sunday. There are chapters throughout the US of the APIII militia network. “There comes a point in time where everybody in this group needs to start being accountable for what they’re doing to help grow the organization and building a network of like-minded people in their area. Because they’re coming for us.”
Donald Trump’s allies have rushed to blame those who tried to warn about the danger they pose to democracy since the attempted assassination of the ex-president. Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs, according to Senator D.D. Vance who is Trump’s running mate. The rhetoric that led to President Trump’s attempted assassination was related to that. Empowered by the righteous fury of victimhood, Trump’s movement wants to cast discussion of his autocratic record and vengeful threats as incitement, smothering the debate at the heart of the 2024 election in a cloying fug of sanctimony.
It’s very easy to point out Republican hypocrisy, and how many times Trump encouraged violence against his opponents. But in this case, the mainstream debate about polarizing political rhetoric isn’t just suffused with bad faith. It also seems to be irrelevant, because the more we learn about the shooter, the less it makes sense to analyze his actions in conventional ideological terms. Though details remain sparse, this appears to be a story less about fanatical partisanship than about the crisis of lonely and disconnected young men being radicalized into pure nihilism.
In the immediate wake of the attack — which killed rally-goer Corey Comperatore as he shielded his family — many understandably assumed that the perpetrator was a leftist like the man who shot Representative Steve Scalise and several others in 2017. But what we’ve learned since then, while not enough to draw firm conclusions, complicates the picture.
The would-be assassin, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, is something of a cipher, leaving little trail online. When he was a teenager, he made a donation to the Progressive Turnout Project, which is a political action committee that uses every trick in the book to convince people to give small amounts. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, his classmates remember him as a conservative when he was in high school. “The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side,” a student in his American history class told The Inquirer.