This past week in one of the strangest local political stories in the last couple years, two white nationalist terrorists pleaded guilty to the attempted bombing of a women's health clinic in Champaign among other terrorist acts. From last Friday's News-Gazette:
2 more alleged Ford County militia members plead guilty to terrorist acts
Two East Central Illinois men who admitted their roles in firebombing an Islamic mosque in Minnesota, trying to firebomb a women’s health clinic in Champaign and other violent acts during 2017 and 2018 associated with a homegrown terrorist group face 35 years to life behind bars.
...
The attempted arson happened Nov. 7, 2017, at Women’s Health Practice, 2125 S. Neil St., C. An employee found a broken window and a homemade pipe bomb that apparently failed to ignite on the floor of a surgery room. At the time, the clinic performed abortions.
McWhorter said he was the lookout at the clinic while Morris admitted breaking the window and tossing in the incendiary device, which fizzled.
More at the full article
here. A couple weeks after their March 2018 arrests and the details of the group's other firebombing, weapons, explosives, and crimes to fund their terrorist activities, the Women's Health Practice ended their abortion services, including surgical abortion services which are
no longer available in Champaign County:
Women seeking abortions at Women's Health Practice are being referred to the Planned Parenthood clinic in Champaign, Reynolds said.
Planned Parenthood's Champaign health center doesn't offer surgical abortion. It provides the abortion pill, which is an at-home medication effective for up to 10 weeks after the start of the last menstrual period.
The organization said pregnant women beyond 10 weeks are referred to other abortion providers in the area.
For women in Champaign County, the referral for in-clinic abortions (using suction or suction and medical tools) is to Planned Parenthood's clinic in Springfield, according to Julie Lynn, spokeswoman for the agency.
More on that from the News-Gazette Health Reporter Q&A on the subject
here. The leader of the group, Michael B. Hari had a long history of far right political activism dating back to protesting the 1993 Branch Davidian siege at Waco. From the
Minneapolis Star Tribune:
In Clarence, a town of fewer than 100 people scattered between barely two dozen homes in various stages of remodeling, Hari was a well-known figure who had a long history of confrontation with authority. He attended college in Texas, and protested at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco during the deadly 1993 standoff between the religious separatist group and federal law enforcement. He later told a newspaper in Illinois that the event, which led to the deaths of more than 75 Branch Davidians, had “galvanized” his beliefs.
Back in Illinois, he worked as a corrections officer and deputy sheriff before being let go in 1997 for what Doran called “odd behavior.”
The News-Gazette also had a timeline of his political activities, eccentricities, and legal battles
here. In his version of events he quit his job as Deputy Sheriff, but the Star Tribune's details of the incident seems more compelling. One of the items that stands out was his concern about immigrants, especially Mexican immigrants replacing Illinois residents. For example from that same
timeline:
In April 2017, Hari told The Chicago Tribune that he drafted a $10 billion plan to build a wall along the border with Mexico, citing President Donald Trump's call for such a wall. Hari drew up the proposal after launching a security company, Crisis Resolution Security Services, the newspaper said.
In it's call to arms on its website (
link from the internet archive), the group declared a state of war between the people of Illinois and the government it believed to be illegitimate. It made arguments for armed revolution while carefully dancing around legal disclaimers against the violence they otherwise advocated:
The government of the State of Illinois is guilty of not only of betraying her republican roots, but also of actual treason against her people. While the people of this state have been fleeing in record numbers, fleeing the abusive government of this state for friendlier places, the governor and legislature have devised a replacement for them: illegal aliens fleeing the more abusive societies south of the Rio Grande. Coming off better than the regimes of banana republics is small praise, but for millions suffering under such governments Illinois still seems a paradise.
On the 28th of August of 2017, “Republican” Governor Bruce Rauner showed up at a Mexican restaurant in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood. With a Mexican Mariachi band performing in the background, Rauner officially welcomed Illinois new replacement population by signing the Illinois TRUST Act. The act prohibits Illinois police from arresting illegal aliens or holding illegal or criminal illegal aliens on federal detention requests. It also prohibits police from asking people about their immigration status. By doing so, Rauner and the legislature have consciously and intentionally chosen a new population to replace the Illinoisans they are driving out. A Mexican population fleeing violence and chaos in the south is more agreeable to the somewhat lesser violence and chaos in Illinois, and with no tradition of self-government, these people won’t miss the constitutional protections that Rauner and Madigan are doing away with. It is an act of treason against their own people to conspire to replace them with foreigners.
It also asked for support from the Trump administration for its top objective of restoring a lower-case "r" republican form of government guaranteed by
Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution (but which he occasionally also cites the 6th Amendment):
Objectives
1. To restore republican government, guaranteed by the 6th Amendment to the US Constitution to the State of Illinois.
...
Appeal for Assistance
We reach out to the Trump Administration to hear our plea and join our revolution—intervening to guarantee us our 6th Amendment rights, and to all other public officials of good will to join with us in our struggle. We fight because we do not know what else to do. We call upon all freedom loving Americans to come to our state and fight by our side for our rights.
What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. the remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.—–Thomas Jefferson Nov. 13. 1787
This report and declaration is issued by the Illinois Revolutionary Commission Government and their fighting arm, the Patriot Freedom Fighters.
The grievances on the archived website vary, but they all will sound familiar to those who have studied the white nationalist or militia movements in the United States. Even the tactics of funding terrorist acts with robberies and other crimes to commit bomb attacks is familiar from
The Turner Diaries, a how-to manual (ADL information link
here) used for decades by white nationalist terrorists, including Timothy McVeigh, similarly radicalized by the Waco siege.
Most of the threats involve feminism, foreigners, non-Christians, LGBT groups, and Marxist conspiracy theories of other modern white nationalist groups. The evolution from more overt and white supremacist and militia movement groups to today's more "colorblind" language of groups dancing around the same promotion of the supremacy of the white Christian male's culture, features, and divine exceptionalism is described and defended. For example they link to a
hate group (more info form the Southern Poverty Law Center
here) that points to divine male authority and these same threats listed above to it.
"Political correctness" is listed as a threat as well and used to excuse the implications and slip-ups that are racial, xenophobic, etc... by blaming people for being overly sensitive. Unfortunately this technique effectively muddles the issue when it conflates more legitimate cultural debates. This distracts from the issue of using euphemistic rhetoric and marketing techniques for the same old white nationalist agenda.
If that wasn't strange enough, days after the Mosque attack, the
White House suggested it may have been part of a series of "fake hate crimes" perpetrated by the left and were waiting on "local authorities to provide their assessment." It was part of an odd and often reality averse statement that preceded the yet undetected terrorist group's attacks in downstate Illinois, including here in Champaign County:
After evading capture for the mosque attack (Trump advisor Sebastian Gorka took to Twitter to suggest the bombing was a fake hate crime staged by “the left”), the fledgling militia allegedly took the crime spree further. In November, they allegedly attempted to bomb a women’s health clinic. The bomb, a potentially devastating thermite device, never detonated. In December, the group allegedly carried out a series of robberies on Wal-Mart stores and people they suspected of being involved in drug trafficking.
And on January 17, the group allegedly attempted to explode a section of Illinois railroad track and then tried “to extort money from the railroad by threatening additional attempts to damage the railroad tracks if the railroad did not pay a ransom,” according to an indictment filed in Illinois.
Blurb from The Daily Beast
here, and more from Newsweek
here.
It is a very unusual story that has affected Champaign County on the abortion issue where opposition and support to access is debated passionately on a regular basis in regular letters to the editor, protests at remaining clinics, and in political debates everywhere. While the public arrests and information on the terrorist group immediately preceded the end of surgical abortion services in Champaign County, the clinic declined to specify its reasons. Peaceful protesters I've talked to and in the press
like to think their prayers and other efforts were the reason behind the sudden change and have moved their efforts to other clinics now. One imagines that whatever role, if any, the terrorist attack had would not be acknowledged to avoid encouraging more clinic attacks, here or elsewhere.
Whatever ones views on the abortion issue itself, the confluence of national and local politics was dramatic. And not only because of that particular heated issue, but the range of far-right issues that motivated this group's call to arms. For example: the far-right motivations driving shutdowns over walls to prevent Americans from being replaced by Mexicans was a side project and motivation for the leader of this terrorist organization. He appealed to the Trump administration for support after it had effectively blamed its first attack on their shared political enemies.
It's a political issue that is often fought on the margins of making the services unavailable to those who believe they have a right to them in more and more places. Restricting access in Champaign County appears to have been gained through violence in our own home by those who would gladly divide us further by race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. Are the new limitations on access permanent? Will there be a push to bring those services back to the area? Time will tell.
