They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency
by Malcolm W. Nance
View on GoodreadsFormer Navy counter-terrorism instructor Malcolm Nance's argument that the post-2020 American radical right — Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Proud Boys, online militia networks — constitutes a coherent insurgency in the technical military-doctrine sense, not a collection of fringe groups.
Core ideas
- The insurgency framework is applied with the rigor of counterinsurgency doctrine — recruitment pipelines, ideological coherence, geographic distribution, force-multiplier media — and the conclusion is that the standard model fits with uncomfortable closeness.
- The Jan 6 attack is treated as a doctrinal event — the test of the network's capability to act coordinatedly in the physical world — and the lesson learned was that it worked better than feared.
- The book is more alarmist than the academic literature on US right-wing extremism (the Toobin/Belew/Berlet/Lyons tradition), and the framing has been contested, but the specific operational analysis holds up.
Published2022
Pages320
ISBN9781250279002
ReadAug 2024
