Hello, readers, and happy Saturday.

On Jan. 6, 2021, you, like me, were probably glued to your TV watching the attack on the U.S. Capitol. During the Trump administration, I had developed sources in extremist circles, and in the days after the chaos, I reported on how the rioters had planned for weeks in plain sight as well as how one far-right group was organizing for the future. In the time since, though, media coverage has shifted to focus on prosecutions of the participants, with much less attention on the active militias. My colleagues and I haven’t stopped thinking about them, though, and the groups haven’t disappeared. Our story this week goes deep on the state of one militia.

ProPublica reporter Joshua Kaplan reviewed more than 100,000 internal messages from American Patriots Three Percent, a militia that has long been one of the largest in the United States and has mostly managed to avoid scrutiny. The messages, which include chats from a secret channel open only to the militia’s leadership, reveal a sort of case study in how militias have evolved between two historic elections, Kaplan told me.

“AP3’s journey turned out to be tumultuous and quite startling, in my opinion, and I learned some things that they’d worked hard to keep under wraps,” said Kaplan.

Josh and I discuss more of the findings from his story, which I hope you’ll also read in full.

What led you to this story, and why did you focus on Scot Seddon, the national commander of AP3?

I actually covered the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol in 2021, and when I was talking to militia members back then, I’d hear bits and pieces about other things they’d done — like collaborations with sheriffs’ departments — that I found fascinating and didn’t think the public had had much chance to see. Ever since, I’d also been wondering: After this world-historic event on Jan. 6, where does the militia movement go from here? That’s a question with very high stakes.

Seddon is a really interesting figure. He’s a former Army reservist and an ex-model (as well as an ex-medical technician and an ex-music industry professional); before he founded AP3, he was arguing about politics in internet modeling forums. But he was able to turn this group into, by some measures, the largest militia in the country, with thousands of armed men under his command. The details of how he managed to achieve that tell us quite a bit about what’s driving the militia movement in the 21st century.

More pointedly, Seddon has changed in recent years in ways that I think mirror the evolution of AP3. For instance, as you’ll see, he becomes increasingly volatile over the course of the story.

Seddon declined my interview requests, and when I sent him a detailed list of questions, he responded, “Lions do not concern themselves with the opinions of men.”

The details in your story are just astounding — like that Seddon would often be driving an Uber Eats delivery while recording video directives to his troops, and that one Oklahoma commander built a barbeque smoker with “APIII” on the side to use for meet-and-greets with police departments. Why are details like that so important to include, and how surprised were you as you found them while reporting?

One goal I had with this story was to show readers the last few years of American politics through the eyes of someone in a militia: what you’d see and hear, the places you’d go, the wide variety of people you’d meet. There was a lot I learned that surprised me. For one, AP3 is simultaneously an armed right-wing paramilitary group and something akin to a Rotary Club. Members barbecue together on Easter Sunday; they organize food drives for the homeless; they had their own monthly magazine, with word games for kids in the back. For a lot of them, the militia is one of the most fulfilling things in their lives.

That softer side of the group serves another purpose too. In internal messages, Seddon and his lieutenants are very explicit about their tactics for getting law enforcement on their side. I wanted to lay out some of the details of that playbook. A leaked FBI counterterrorism guide once noted that investigations of “militia extremists” often find “active links to law enforcement officers.” But how militias manage to forge those ties rarely comes into public view.

On its own, a group of guys getting together to grill and make magazines doesn’t necessitate a counterterrorism guide. How do extremist action and intention play out?

AP3 has already sought to shape American life through vigilante operations. For instance, members went to the Texas border, where they conducted armed patrols and “rounded up” migrants.

There’s also been a real schism in AP3 over if and when the group should commit mass-scale political violence. It’s an intense running debate that got to the point where some people quit because they were scared. And AP3 members aren’t generally people who are rattled by a little tough talk. One former leader told me, “There’s going to be a time to be violent. I’m the type of person who’s like, ‘Now is not the time.’” In AP3, that made him a moderate.

There’s an urgent question behind all of this: Will we look back on Jan. 6 as the high water mark of militia violence in America or as just a prelude to something more catastrophic? Experts say it’s still too early to know the answer. They think that a lot will hinge on the November election. AP3 members have said some scary things about what they’re ready to do if the election is “stolen” from Donald Trump again.

What is shifting now in militialand, and what should people look out for?

Since Jan. 6, militias have moved more of their planning underground. The militia movement has also become more decentralized — rather than being dominated by big national groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and AP3, you’re seeing more local and state-level organizations (although plenty of those smaller groups are still coordinating with one another behind the scenes). One consequence of all that is that it could be harder for law enforcement to track these groups and harder for law enforcement to intervene before one can commit violence.

AP3 has fractured significantly in the last several months, with a lot of people leaving and joining other militias. Seddon’s ranks are definitely smaller than they were a year ago. But I wouldn’t necessarily count him out. There have been other times when he’s lost a big chunk of his membership in some internal feud; so far, he’s always been able to recover. In the right political circumstances — say, the sort of climate that might follow a divisive presidential election — he’s been able to turn local chapters from skeleton crews to significant forces in a very short time.