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A mole infiltrated the highest ranks of American militias. Here's what he found.
ProPublica
January 4, 2025 8:26PM ET
John Williams kept a backpack filled with everything he’d need to go on the run: three pairs of socks; a few hundred dollars cash; makeshift disguises and lock-picking gear; medical supplies, vitamins and high-calorie energy gels; and thumb drives that each held more than 100 gigabytes of encrypted documents, which he would quickly distribute if he were about to be arrested or killed.
On April 1, 2023, Williams retrieved the bag from his closet and rushed to his car. He had no time to clean the dishes that had accumulated in his apartment. He did not know if armed men were out looking for him. He did not know if he would ever feel safe to return. He parked his car for the night in the foothills overlooking Salt Lake City and curled up his 6-foot-4-inch frame in the back seat of the 20-year-old Honda. This was his new home.
He turned on a recording app to add an entry to his diary. His voice had the high-pitched rasp of a lifelong smoker: “Where to fucking start,” he sighed, taking a deep breath. After more than two years undercover, he’d been growing rash and impulsive. He had feared someone was in danger and tried to warn him, but it backfired. Williams was sure at least one person knew he was a double agent now, he said into his phone. “It’s only a matter of time before it gets back to the rest.”
In the daylight, Williams dropped an envelope with no return address in a U.S. Postal Service mailbox. He’d loaded it with a flash drive and a gold Oath Keepers medallion.
It was addressed to me.
The documents laid out a remarkable odyssey. Posing as an ideological compatriot, Williams had penetrated the top ranks of two of the most prominent right-wing militias in the country. He’d slept in the home of the man who claims to be the new head of the Oath Keepers, rifling through his files in the middle of the night. He’d devised elaborate ruses to gather evidence of militias’ ties to high-ranking law enforcement officials. He’d uncovered secret operations like the surveillance of a young journalist, then improvised ways to sabotage the militants’ schemes. In one group, his ploys were so successful that he became the militia’s top commander in the state of Utah.
Now he was a fugitive. He drove south toward a desert four hours from the city, where he could disappear.
1. Prelude
I’d first heard from Williams five months earlier, when he sent me an intriguing but mysterious anonymous email. “I have been attempting to contact national media and civil rights groups for over a year and been ignored,” it read. “I’m tired of yelling into the void.” He sent it to an array of reporters. I was the only one to respond. I’ve burned a lot of time sating my curiosity about emails like that. I expected my interest to die after a quick call. Instead, I came to occupy a dizzying position as the only person to know the secret Williams had been harboring for almost two years.
We spoke a handful of times over encrypted calls before he fled. He’d been galvanized by the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol, Williams told me, when militias like the Oath Keepers conspired to violently overturn the 2020 presidential election. He believed democracy was under siege from groups the FBI has said pose a major domestic terrorism threat. So he infiltrated the militia movement on spec, as a freelance vigilante. He did not tell the police or the FBI. A loner, he did not tell his family or friends.
Williams seemed consumed with how to ensure this wasn’t all a self-destructive, highly dangerous waste of time. He distrusted law enforcement and didn’t want to be an informant, he said. He told me he hoped to damage the movement by someday going public with what he’d learned.
The Capitol riot had been nagging at me too. I’d reported extensively on Jan. 6. I’d sat with families who blamed militias for snatching their loved ones away from them, pulling them into a life of secret meetings and violent plots — or into a jail cell. By the time Williams contacted me, though, the most infamous groups appeared to have largely gone dark. Were militias more enduring, more potent, than it seemed?
Some of what he told me seemed significant. Still, before the package arrived, it could feel like I was corresponding with a shadow. I knew Williams treated deception as an art form. “When you spin a lie,” he once told me, “you have to have things they can verify so they won’t think to ask questions.” While his stories generally seemed precise and sober — always reassuring for a journalist — I needed to proceed with extreme skepticism.
So I pored over his files, tens of thousands of them. They included dozens of hours of conversations he secretly recorded and years of private militia chat logs and videos. I was able to authenticate those through other sources, in and out of the movement. I also talked to dozens of people, from Williams’ friends to other members of his militias. I dug into his tumultuous past and discovered records online he hadn’t pointed me to that supported his account.
The files give a unique window, at once expansive and intimate, into one of the most consequential and volatile social movements of our time. Williams penetrated a new generation of paramilitary leaders, which included doctors, career cops and government attorneys. Sometimes they were frightening, sometimes bumbling, always heavily armed. It was a world where a man would propose assassinating politicians, only to spark a debate about logistics.
Federal prosecutors have convicted more than 1,000 people for their role in Jan. 6. Key militia captains were sent to prison for a decade or more. But that did not quash the allure that militias hold for a broad swath of Americans.
Now President-elect Donald Trump has promised to pardon Jan. 6 rioters when he returns to the White House. Experts warn that such a move could trigger a renaissance for militant extremists, sending them an unprecedented message of protection and support — and making it all the more urgent to understand them.
(Unless otherwise noted, none of the militia members mentioned in this story responded to requests for comment.)
Williams is part of a larger cold war, radical vs. radical, that’s stayed mostly in the shadows. A left-wing activist told me he personally knows about 30 people who’ve gone undercover in militias or white supremacist groups. They did not coordinate with law enforcement, instead taking the surveillance of one of the most intractable features of American politics into their own hands.
Skeptical of authorities, militias have sought to reshape the country through armed action. Williams sought to do it through betrayals and lies, which sat with him uneasily. “I couldn’t have been as successful at this if I wasn’t one of them in some respects,” he once told me. “I couldn’t have done it so long unless they recognized something in me.”
2. The Struggle
If there is one moment that set Williams on his path into the militia underground, it came roughly a decade before Jan. 6, when he was sent to a medium-security prison. He was in his early 30s, drawn to danger and filled with an inner turbulence.
Williams grew up in what he described to me, to friends and in court records as a dysfunctional and unhappy home. He was a gay child in rural America. His father viewed homosexuality as a mortal sin, he said. Williams spent much of his childhood outdoors, bird-watching, camping and trying to spend as little time as possible at home. (John Williams is now his legal name, one he recently acquired.)
Once he was old enough to move out, Williams continued to go off the grid for weeks at a time. Living in a cave interested him; the jobs he’d found at grocery stores and sandwich shops did not. He told me his young adulthood was “a blank space in my life,” a stretch of “petty crime” and falling-outs with old friends. He pled guilty to a series of misdemeanors: trespassing, criminal mischief, assault.
What landed Williams in prison was how he responded to one of those arrests. He sent disturbing, anonymous emails to investigators on the case, threatening their families. Police traced the messages back to him and put him away for three years.
Williams found time to read widely in prison — natural history books, Bertrand Russell, Cormac McCarthy. And it served as a finishing school for a skill that would be crucial in his undercover years. Surviving prison meant learning to maneuver around gang leaders and corrections officers. He learned how to steer conversations to his own benefit without the other person noticing.
When he got out, he had a clear ambition: to become a wilderness survival instructor. He used Facebook to advertise guided hikes in Utah’s Uinta Mountains. An old photo captures Williams looking like a lanky camp counselor as he shows students an edible plant. He sports a thick ponytail and cargo pants, painted toenails poking out from his hiking sandals.
Many people in Utah had turned to wilderness survival after a personal crisis, forming a community of misfits who thrived in environments harsh and remote. Even among them, Williams earned a reputation for putting himself in extreme situations. “Not many people are willing to struggle on their own. He takes that struggle to a high degree,” one friend told me admiringly. Williams took up krav maga and muay thai because he enjoyed fistfights. He once spent 40 days alone in the desert with only a knife, living off chipmunks and currants (by choice, to celebrate a birthday).
Williams struggled to get his survival business going. He’d hand out business cards at hobbyist gatherings with promises of adventure, but in practice, he was mostly leading seminars in city parks for beer money. He would only take calls in emergencies, another friend recalled, because he wanted to save money on minutes.
Then around New Year’s in 2019, according to Williams, he received an email from a leader in American Patriots Three Percent, or AP3. He wanted to hire Williams for a training session. He could pay $1,000.
Finally, Williams thought. I’m starting to get some traction.
3. The Decision
They had agreed there’d be no semiautomatic rifles, Williams told me, so everyone brought a sidearm. Some dozen militiamen had driven into the mountains near Peter Sinks, Utah, one of the coldest places in the contiguous U.S. Initially they wanted training in evasion and escape, Williams said, but he thought they needed to work up to that. So for three days, he taught them the basics of wilderness survival, but with a twist: how to stay alive while “trying to stay hidden.” He showed them how to build a shelter that would both keep them dry and escape detection. How to make a fire, then how to clean it up so no one could tell it was ever there.
As the days wore on, stray comments started to irk him. Once, a man said he’d been “kiked” into overpaying for his Ruger handgun. At the end of the training, AP3 leaders handed out matching patches. The ritual reminded Williams of a biker gang.
He’d already been to some shorter AP3 events to meet the men and tailor the lesson to his first meaningful client, Williams told me. But spending days in the woods with them felt different. He said he found the experience unpleasant and decided not to work with the group again.
This portion of Williams’ story — exactly how and why he first became a militia member — is the hardest to verify. By his own account, he kept his thoughts and plans entirely to himself. At the time, he was too embarrassed to even tell his friends what happened that weekend, he said. In the survival community, training militias was considered taboo.
I couldn’t help but wonder if Williams was hiding a less gallant backstory. Maybe he’d joined AP3 out of genuine enthusiasm and then soured on it. Maybe now he was trying to fool me. Indeed, when I called the AP3 leader who set up the training, he disputed Williams’ timeline. He remembered Williams staying sporadically but consistently involved after the session in the mountains, as a friend of the group who attended two or three events a year. To further muddy the picture, Williams had warned me the man would say something like that — Williams had worked hard to create the impression that he never left, he said, that he’d just gone inactive for a while, busy with work. (Remarkably, the AP3er defended Williams’ loyalty each time I asserted he’d secretly tried to undermine the group. “He was very well-respected,” he said. “I never questioned his honesty or his intentions.”)
Even Williams’ friends told me he was something of a mystery to them. But I found evidence that supports his story where so many loners bare their innermost thoughts: the internet. In 2019 and early 2020, Williams wrote thousands of since-deleted entries in online forums. These posts delivered a snapshot of his worldview in this period: idiosyncratic, erudite and angry with little room for moderation. “There are occasionally militia types that want these skills to further violent fringe agendas and I will absolutely not enable them,” he wrote in one 2020 entry about wilderness survival. In another, he called AP3 and its allies “far right lunatics.” The posts didn’t prove the details of his account, but here was the Williams I knew, writing under pseudonyms long before we’d met.
One day, he’d voice his disdain for Trump voters, neoliberalism or “the capitalist infrastructure.” Another, he’d rail against gun control measures as immoral. When Black Lives Matter protests broke out in 2020, Williams wrote that he was gathering medical supplies for local protestors. He sounded at times like a revolutionary crossed with a left-wing liberal arts student. “The sole job of a cop is to bully citizens on behalf of the state,” he wrote. “Violent overthrow of the state is our only viable option.”
Then came Jan. 6. As he was watching on TV, he later told me, Williams thought he recognized the patch on a rioter’s tactical vest. It looked like the one that AP3 leaders had handed out at the end of his training.
Did I teach that guy? he wondered. Why was I so cordial to them all? If they knew I was gay, I bet they’d want me dead, and I actually helped them. Because I was too selfish to think of anything but my career.
Shame quickly turned to anger, he told me, and to a desire for revenge. Pundits were saying that democracy itself was in mortal peril. Williams took that notion literally. He assumed countless Americans would respond with aggressive action, he said, and he wanted to be among them.
4. A New World
Williams stood alone in his apartment, watching himself in the mirror.
“I’m tall.”
“I’m Dave.”
“I’m tall.”
“I’m Dave.”
He tried to focus on his mannerisms, on the intonation of his voice. Whether he was saying the truth or a falsehood, he wanted to appear exactly the same.
Months had passed since the Capitol riot. By all appearances, Williams was now an enthusiastic member of AP3. Because he already had an in, joining the group was easy, he said. Becoming a self-fashioned spy took some trial and error, however. In the early days, he had posed as a homeless person to surveil militia training facilities, but he decided that was a waste of time.
The casual deceit that had served him in prison was proving useful. Deviousness was a skill, and he stayed up late working to hone it. He kept a journal with every lie he told so he wouldn’t lose track. His syllabus centered on acting exercises and the history of espionage and cults. People like sex cult leader Keith Raniere impressed him most — he studied biographies to learn how they manipulated people, how they used cruelty to wear their followers down into acquiescence.
Williams regularly berated the militia’s rank and file. He doled out condescending advice about the group’s security weaknesses, warning their technical incompetence would make them easy targets for left-wing hackers and government snoops. Orion Rollins, the militia’s top leader in Utah, soon messaged Williams to thank him for the guidance. “Don’t worry about being a dick,” he wrote. “It’s time to learn and become as untraceable as possible.” (The AP3 messages Williams sent me were so voluminous that I spent an entire month reading them before I noticed this exchange.)
Williams was entering the militia at a pivotal time. AP3 once had chapters in nearly every state, with a roster likely in the tens of thousands; as authorities cracked down on the movement after Jan. 6, membership was plummeting. Some who stayed on had white nationalist ties. Others were just lonely conservatives who had found purpose in the paramilitary cause. For now, the group’s leaders were focused on saving the militia, not taking up arms to fight their enemies. (Thanks to Williams’ trove and records from several other sources, I was eventually able to write an investigation into AP3’s resurgence.)
On March 4, 2021, Williams complained to Rollins that everyone was still ignoring his advice. Williams volunteered to take over as the state’s “intel officer,” responsible for protecting the group from outside scrutiny.
“My hands are tied,” Williams wrote. “If I’m not able to” take charge, the whole militia “might unravel.” Rollins gave him the promotion.
“Thanks Orion. You’ve shown good initiative here.” Privately, he saw a special advantage to his appointment. If anyone suspected there was a mole in Utah, Williams would be the natural choice to lead the mole hunt.
Now he had a leadership role. What he did not yet have was a plan. But how could he decide on goals, he figured, until he knew more about AP3? He would work to gather information and rise through the ranks by being the best militia member he could be.
He took note of the job titles of leaders he met, like an Air Force reserve master sergeant (I confirmed this through military records) who recruited other airmen into the movement. Williams attended paramilitary trainings, where the group practiced ambushes with improvised explosives and semiautomatic guns. He offered his comrades free lessons in hand-to-hand combat and bonded with them in the backcountry hunting jackrabbits. When the militia joined right-wing rallies for causes like gun rights, they went in tactical gear. Williams attended as their “gray man,” he said — assigned to blend in with the crowd and call in armed reinforcements if tensions erupted.
Since his work was seasonal, Williams could spend as much as 40 hours a week on militia activities. One of his duties as intel officer was to monitor the group’s enemies on the left, which could induce vertigo. A militia leader once dispatched him to a Democratic Socialists of America meeting at a local library, he said, where he saw a Proud Boy he recognized from a joint militia training. Was this a closet right-winger keeping tabs on the socialists? Or a closet leftist who might dox him or inform the police?
He first contacted me in October 2022. He couldn’t see how the movement was changing beyond his corner of Utah. AP3 was reinvigorated by then, I later found, with as many as 50 recruits applying each day. In private chats I reviewed, leaders were debating if they should commit acts of terrorism. At the Texas border, members were rounding up immigrants in armed patrols. But Williams didn’t know all that yet. On our first call, he launched into a litany of minutiae: names, logistical details, allegations of minor players committing petty crimes. He could tell I wasn’t sure what it all amounted to.
Williams feared that if anything he’d helped AP3, not damaged it. Then, in early November, Rollins told him to contact a retired detective named Bobby Kinch.
5. The Detective and the Sheriff
Williams turned on a recording device and dialed. Kinch picked up after one ring: “What’s going on?” he bellowed. “How you doing, man?”
“I don’t know if you remember me,” Kinch continued, but they’d met years before.
“Oh, oh, back in the day,” Williams said, stuttering for a second. He knew Kinch was expecting the call but was confused by the warm reception. Maybe Kinch was at the training in 2019?
“Well I’m the sitting, current national director of the Oath Keepers now.”
The militia’s eye-patched founder, Stewart Rhodes, was in jail amid his trial for conspiring to overthrow the government on Jan. 6. Kinch said he was serving on the group’s national board when his predecessor was arrested. Rhodes had called from jail to say, “Do not worry about me. This is God’s way.”
“He goes, ‘But I want you to save the organization.’”
Kinch explained that Rollins, who’d recently defected to the Oath Keepers, had been singing Williams’ praises. (Bound by shared ideology, militias are more porous than outsiders would think. Members often cycle between groups like square dance partners.) “I imagine your plate is full with all the crazy stuff going on in the world, but I’d love to sit down.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Williams said. “AP3 and Oath Keepers should definitely be working together.” He proposed forming a joint reconnaissance team so their two militias could collaborate on intelligence operations. Kinch lit up. “I’m a career cop,” he said. “I did a lot of covert stuff, surveillance.”
By the time they hung up 45 minutes later, Kinch had invited Williams to come stay at his home. Williams felt impressed with himself. The head of the most infamous militia in America was treating him like an old friend.
To me, Williams sounded like a different person on the call, with the same voice but a brand new personality. It was the first recording that I listened to and the first time I became certain the most important part of his story was true. To authenticate the record, I independently confirmed nonpublic details Kinch discussed on the tape, a process I repeated again and again with the other files. Soon I had proof of what would otherwise seem outlandish: Williams’ access was just as deep as he claimed.
I could see why people would be eager to follow Kinch. Even when he sermonized on the “global elitist cabal,” he spoke with the affable passion of a beloved high school teacher. I’d long been fascinated by the prevalence of cops on militia rosters, so I started examining his backstory.
Kinch grew up in upstate New York, the son of a World War II veteran who had him at about 50. When Kinch was young, he confided in a later recording, he was a “wheelman,” slang for getaway driver. “I ran from the cops so many fucking times,” he said. But “at the end of the day, you know, I got away. I never got caught.”
He moved to Las Vegas and, at the age of 25, became an officer in the metro police. Kinch came to serve in elite detective units over 23 years in the force, hunting fugitives and helping take down gangs like the Playboy Bloods. Eventually he was assigned to what he called the “Black squad,” according to court records, tasked with investigating violent crimes where the suspect was African American. (A Las Vegas police spokesperson told me they stopped “dividing squads by a suspect’s race” a year before Kinch retired.)
Then around Christmas in 2013, Kinch’s career began to self-destruct. In a series of Facebook posts, he said that he would welcome a “race war.” “Bring it!” he wrote. “I’m about as fed up as a man (American, Christian, White, Heterosexual) can get!” An ensuing investigation prompted the department to tell the Secret Service that Kinch “could be a threat to the president,” according to the Las Vegas Sun. (The Secret Service interviewed him and determined he was not a threat to President Barack Obama, the outlet reported. Kinch told the paper he was not racist and that he was being targeted by colleagues with “an ax to grind.”) In 2016, he turned in his badge, a year after the saga broke in the local press.
Kinch moved to southern Utah and found a job hawking hunting gear at a Sportsman’s Warehouse. But he “had this urge,” he later said on a right-wing podcast. “Like I wasn’t done yet.” So he joined the Oath Keepers. “When people tell me that violence doesn’t solve anything, I look back over my police career,” he once advised his followers. “And I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, because violence did solve quite a bit.’”
Kinch added Williams to an encrypted Signal channel where the Utah Oath Keepers coordinated their intel work. Two weeks later on Nov. 30, 2022, Williams received a cryptic message from David Coates, one of Kinch’s top deputies.
Coates was an elder statesman of sorts in the Oath Keepers, a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran with a Hulk Hogan mustache. There’d been a break-in at the Utah attorney general’s office, he reported to the group, and for some unspoken reason, the Oath Keepers seemed to think this was of direct relevance to them. Coates promised to find out more about the burglary: “The Sheriff should have some answers” to “my inquiries today or tomorrow.”
That last line would come to obsess Williams. He sent a long, made-up note about his own experiences collaborating with law enforcement officials. “I’m curious, how responsive is the Sheriff to your inquiries? Or do you have a source you work with?”
“The Sheriff has become a personal friend who hosted my FBI interview,” Coates responded. “He opens a lot of doors.” Coates had been in D.C. on Jan. 6, he’d told Williams. It’d make sense if that had piqued the FBI’s interest.
To Williams, it hinted at a more menacing scenario — at secret ties between those who threaten the rule of the law and those duty-bound to enforce it. He desperately wanted more details, more context, the sheriff’s name. But he didn’t want to push for too much too fast.
6. The Hunting of Man
A forest engulfed Kinch’s house on all sides. He lived in a half-million-dollar cabin in summer home country, up 8,000 feet in the mountains outside Zion National Park. Williams stood in the kitchen on a mid-December Saturday morning.
Williams had recently made a secret purchase of a small black device off Amazon. It looked like a USB drive. The on-off switch and microphone holes revealed what it really was: a bug. As the two men chatted over cups of cannoli-flavored coffee, Williams didn’t notice when Kinch’s dog snatched the bug from his bag.
The night before, Williams had slept in the guest room. The house was cluttered with semiautomatic rifles. He had risked photographing three plaques on the walls inscribed with the same Ernest Hemingway line. “There is no hunting like the hunting of man,” they read. “Those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else.”
They spotted the dog at the same time. The bug was attached to a charging device. The animal was running around with it like it was a tennis ball. As Kinch went to retrieve it, Williams felt panic grip his chest. Could anyone talk their way out of this? He’d learned enough about Kinch to be terrified of his rage. Looking around, Williams eyed his host’s handgun on the kitchen counter.
If he even starts to examine it, I’ll grab the gun, he thought. Then I’ll shoot him and flee into the woods.
Kinch took the bug from the dog’s mouth. Then he handed it right to Williams and started to apologize.
Don’t worry about it, Williams said. He’s a puppy!
On their way out the door, Kinch grabbed the pistol and placed it in the console of his truck. It was an hour’s drive to the nearest city, where the Oath Keepers were holding a leadership meeting. Williams rode shotgun, his bug hooked onto the zipper of his backpack. On the tape, I could hear the wind racing through the car window. The radio played Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69.”
Kinch seemed in the hold of a dark nostalgia — as if he was wrestling with the monotony of civilian life, with the new strictures he faced since turning in his badge. Twenty minutes in, he recited the Hemingway line like it was a mantra. “I have a harder time killing animals than a human being,” Kinch continued. Then he grew quiet as he recounted the night he decided to retire.
He’d woken up in an oleander bush with no memory of how he’d gotten there. His hands were covered in blood. He was holding a gun. “I had to literally take my magazine out and count my bullets, make sure I didn’t fucking kill somebody,” he said. “I black out when I get angry. And I don’t remember what the fuck I did.”
Kinch went on: “I love the adrenaline of police work,” and then he paused. “I miss it. It was a hoot.”
By the time they reached Cedar City, Utah, Kinch was back to charismatic form. He dished out compliments to the dozen or so Oath Keepers assembled for the meeting — “You look like you lost weight” — and told everyone to put their phones in their cars. “It’s just good practice. Because at some point we may have to go down a route,” one of his deputies explained, trailing off.
Kinch introduced Williams to the group. “He’s not the feds. And if he is, he’s doing a damn good job.”
Williams laughed, a little too loud.
7. Doctor, Lawyer, Sergeant, Spy
Early in the meeting, Kinch laid out his vision for the Oath Keepers’ role in American life. “We have a two-edged sword,” he said. The “dull edge” was more traditional grassroots work, exemplified by efforts to combat alleged election fraud. He hoped to build their political apparatus so that in five or 10 years, conservative candidates would be seeking the Oath Keepers’ endorsement.
Then there was the sharp edge: paramilitary training. “You hone all these skills because when the dull edge fails, you’ve got to be able to turn that around and be sharp.” The room smelled like donuts, one of the men had remarked.
The week before, Kinch’s predecessor had been convicted of seditious conspiracy. This was their first meeting since the verdict, and I opened the recordings later with the same anticipation I feel sitting down for the Super Bowl. What would come next for the militia after this historic trial: ruin, recovery or revolt?
The stature of men leading the group’s post-Jan. 6 resurrection startled me. I was expecting the ex-cops, like the one from Fresno, California, who said he stayed on with the militia because “this defines me.” Militias tend to prize law enforcement ties; during an armed operation, it could be useful to have police see you as a friend.
But there was also an Ohio OB-GYN on the national board of directors — he used to work for the Cleveland Clinic, I discovered, and now led a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group. The doctor was joined at board meetings by a city prosecutor in Utah, an ex-city council member and, Williams was later told, a sergeant with an Illinois sheriff’s department. (The doctor did not respond to requests for comment. He has since left his post with the UnitedHealth subsidiary, a spokesperson for the company said.)
Over six hours, the men set goals and delegated responsibilities with surprisingly little worry about the federal crackdown on militias. They discussed the scourges they were there to combat (stolen elections, drag shows, President Joe Biden) only in asides. Instead, they focused on “marketing” — “So what buzzwords can we insert in our mission statement?” one asked — and on resources that’d help local chapters rapidly expand. “I’d like to see this organization be like the McDonald’s of patriot organizations,” another added. To Williams, it felt more like a Verizon sales meeting than an insurrectionist cell.
Kinch had only recently taken over and as I listened, I wondered how many followers he really had outside of that room. They hadn’t had a recruitment drive in the past year, which they resolved to change. They had $1,700 in the bank. But it didn’t seem entirely bravado. Kinch and his comrades mentioned conversations with chapters around the county.
Then as they turned from their weakened national presence to their recent successes in Utah, Williams snapped to attention.
“We had surveillance operations,” Kinch said, without elaboration.
“We’re making progress locally on the law enforcement,” Coates added. He said that at least three of them can get “the sheriff” on the phone any time of day. Like the last time, Coates didn’t give a name, but he said something even more intriguing: “The sheriff is my tie-in to the state attorney general because he’s friends.” Williams told me he fought the urge to lob a question. (The attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)
Closing out the day, Kinch summarized their plan moving forward: Keep a low profile. Focus on the unglamorous work. Rebuild their national footprint. And patiently prepare for 2024. “We still got what, two more years, till another quote unquote election?” He thanked Williams for coming and asked if they could start planning training exercises.
“Absolutely, yeah, I’m excited about that.” Williams was resolved to find his way onto the national board.
8. The Stakeout
On Dec. 17, 2022, a week after the meeting, Williams called a tech-savvy 19-year-old Oath Keeper named Rowan. He’d told Rowan he was going to teach him to infiltrate leftist groups, but Williams’ real goal was far more underhanded. While the older Oath Keepers had demurred at his most sensitive questions recently, the teenager seemed eager to impress a grizzled survival instructor. By assigning missions to Rowan, he hoped to probe the militias’ secrets without casting suspicion on himself.
“You don’t quite have the life experience to do this,” Williams opened on the recording. But with a couple years’ training, “I think we can work towards that goal.” He assigned his student a scholarly monograph, “Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society,” to begin his long education in how leftists think. “Perfect,” Rowan responded. He paused to write the title down.
Then came his pupil’s first exercise: build a dossier on Williams’ boss in AP3. Williams explained it was safest to practice on people they knew.
In Rowan, Williams had found a particularly vulnerable target. He was on probation at the time. According to court records, earlier that year, Rowan had walked up to a stranger’s truck as she was leaving her driveway. She rolled down her window. He punched her several times in the face. When police arrived, Rowan began screaming that he was going to kill them and threatened to “blow up the police department.” He was convicted of misdemeanor assault.
Williams felt guilty about using the young man but also excited. (“He is completely in my palm,” he recorded in his diary.) Within a few weeks, he had Rowan digging into Kinch’s background. “I’m going to gradually have him do more and more things,” he said in the diary, “with the hopes that I can eventually get him to hack” into militia leaders’ accounts.
The relationship quickly unearthed something that disturbed him. The week of their call, Williams woke up to a series of angry messages in the Oath Keepers’ encrypted Signal channel. The ire was directed toward a Salt Lake Tribune reporter who, according to Coates, was “a real piece of shit.” His sins included critical coverage of “anyone trying to expose voter fraud” and writing about a local political figure who’d appeared on a leaked Oath Keepers roster.
Williams messaged Rowan. “I noticed in the chat that there is some kind of red list of journalists etc? Could you get that to me?” he asked. “It would be very helpful to my safety when observing political rallies or infiltrating leftists.”
“Ah yes, i have doxes on many journalists in utah,” Rowan responded, using slang for sharing someone’s personal data with malicious intent.
He sent over a dossier on the Tribune reporter, which opened with a brief manifesto: “This dox goes out to those that have been terrorized, doxed, harassed, slandered, and family names mutilated by these people.” It provided the reporter’s address and phone number, along with two pictures of his house.
Then Rowan shared similar documents about a local film critic — he’d posted a “snarky” retweet of the Tribune writer — and about a student reporter at Southern Utah University. The college student had covered a rally the Oath Keepers recently attended, Rowan explained, and the militia believed he was coordinating with the Tribune. “We found the car he drove through a few other members that did a stakeout.”
“That’s awesome,” Williams said. Internally, he was reeling: a stakeout? In the dossier, he found a backgrounder on the student’s parents along with their address. Had armed men followed this kid around? Did they surveil his family home?
His notes show him wrestling with a decision he hadn’t let himself reckon with before: Was it time to stop being a fly on the wall and start taking action? Did he need to warn someone? The journalists? The police? Breaking character would open the door to disaster. The incident with Kinch’s dog had been a chilling reminder of the risks.
Williams had been in the militia too long. He was losing his sense of objectivity. The messages were alarming, but were they an imminent threat? He couldn’t tell. Williams had made plans to leave Utah if his cover was blown. He didn’t want to jeopardize two years of effort over a false alarm. But what if he did nothing and this kid got hurt?
9. The Plan
By 2023, Williams’ responsibilities were expanding as rapidly as his anxiety. His schedule was packed with events for AP3, the Oath Keepers and a third militia he’d recently gotten inside. He vowed to infiltrate the Proud Boys and got Coates to vouch for him with the local chapter. He prepared plans to penetrate a notorious white supremacist group too.
His adversaries were gaining momentum as well. Williams soon made the four-hour drive to Kinch’s house for another leadership meeting and was told on tape about a national Oath Keepers recruiting bump; they’d also found contact information for 40,000 former members, which they hoped to use to bring a flood of militiamen back into the fold.
Despite the risk to his own safety and progress, Williams decided to send the journalists anonymous warnings from burner accounts. He attached sensitive screenshots so that they’d take him seriously. And then … nothing. The reporters never responded; he wondered if the messages went to spam. His secret was still secure.
But the point of his mission was finally coming into focus. He was done simply playing the part of model militia member. His plan had two parts: After gathering as much compromising information as he could, he would someday release it all online, he told me. He carefully documented anything that looked legally questionable, hoping law enforcement would find something useful for a criminal case. At the very least, going public could make militiamen more suspicious of each other.
In the meantime, he would undermine the movement from the inside. He began trying to blunt the danger that he saw lurking in every volatile situation the militiamen put themselves in.
On Jan. 27, 2023, body camera footage from the police killing of Tyre Nichols, an unarmed Black man, became public. “The footage is gruesome and distressing,” The New York Times reported. “Cities across the U.S. are bracing for protests.” The militias had often responded to Black Lives Matter rallies with street brawls and armed patrols.
Williams had visions of Kyle Rittenhouse-esque shootings in the streets. He put his newly formulated strategy into action, sending messages to militiamen around the country with made-up rumors he hoped would persuade them to stay home.
In Utah, he wrote to Kinch and the leaders of his other two militias. He would be undercover at the protests in Salt Lake City, he wrote. If any militiamen went, even “a brief look of recognition could blow my cover and put my life in danger.” All three ordered their troops to avoid the event. (“This is a bit of a bummer,” one AP3 member responded. “I’ve got some aggression built up I need to let out.”)
After the protests, Williams turned on his voice diary and let out a long sigh. For weeks, he’d been nauseous and had trouble eating. He’d developed insomnia that would keep him up until dawn. He’d gone to the rally to watch for militia activity. When he got home, he’d vomited blood.
Even grocery shopping took hours now. He circled the aisles to check if he was being tailed. Once while driving, he thought he caught someone following him. He’d reached out to a therapist to help “relieve some of this pressure,” he said, but was afraid to speak candidly with him. “I can check his office for bugs and get his electronics out of the office. And then once we’re free, I can tell him what’s going on.”
He quickly launched into a litany of items on his to-do list. A training exercise to attend. A recording device he needed to find a way to install. “I’m just fucking sick of being around these toxic motherfuckers.”
“It’s getting to be too much for me.”
10. The Deep State
On March 20, Williams called Scot Seddon, the founder of AP3. If he was on the verge of a breakdown, it didn’t impact his performance. I could tell when Williams was trying to advance his agenda as I listened later, but he was subtle about it. Obsequious. Methodical. By day’s end, he’d achieved perhaps his most remarkable feat yet. He’d helped persuade Seddon and his lieutenants to fire the head of AP3’s Utah chapter and to install Williams in his place.
Now he had access to sensitive records only senior militia leaders could see. He had final say over the group’s actions in an entire state. He knew the coup would make him vastly more effective. Yet that night in his voice diary, Williams sounded like a man in despair.
The success only added to his paranoia. Becoming a major figure in the Utah militia scene raised a possibility he couldn’t countenance: He might be arrested and sent to jail for some action of his comrades.
With a sense of urgency now, he focused even more intently on militia ties to government authorities. “I have been still collecting evidence on the paramilitaries’ use of law enforcement,” he said in the diary entry. “It’s way deeper than I thought.”
He solved the mystery of the Oath Keepers’ “sheriff”: It was the sheriff for Iron County, Utah, a tourist hub near two national parks. He assigned Rowan to dig deeper into the official’s ties with the movement and come back with emails or text messages. (In a recent interview, the sheriff told me that he declined an offer to join the Oath Keepers but that he’s known “quite a few” members and thinks “they’re generally good people.” Coates has periodically contacted him about issues like firearms rules that Coates believes are unconstitutional, the sheriff said. “If I agree, I contact the attorney general’s office.”)
Claiming to work on “a communication strategy for reaching out to law enforcement,” Williams then goaded AP3 members into bragging about their police connections. They told him about their ties with high-ranking officers in Missouri and in Louisiana, in Texas and in Tennessee.
The revelations terrified him. “When this gets out, I think I’m probably going to flee overseas,” he said in his diary. “They have too many connections.” What if a cop ally helped militants track him down? “I don’t think I can safely stay within the United States.”
Four days later, he tuned into a Zoom seminar put on by a fellow AP3 leader. It was a rambling and sparsely attended meeting. But 45 minutes in, a woman brought up an issue in her Virginia hometown, population 23,000.
The town’s vice mayor, a proud election denier, was under fire for a homophobic remark. She believed a local reporter covering the controversy was leading a secret far-left plot. What’s more, the reporter happened to be her neighbor. To intimidate her, she said, he’d been leaving dead animals on her lawn.
“I think I have to settle a score with this guy,” she concluded. “They’re getting down to deep state local level and it’s got to be stopped.” After the call, Williams went to turn off his recording device. “Well, that was fucking insane,” he said aloud.
He soon reached out to the woman to offer his advice. Maybe he could talk her down, Williams thought, or at least determine what she meant by settling a score. But she wasn’t interested in speaking with him. So again he faced a choice: do nothing or risk his cover being blown. He finally came to the same conclusion he had the last time he’d feared journalists were in jeopardy. On March 31, he sent an anonymous warning.
“Because she is a member of a right wing militia group and is heavily armed, I wanted to let you know,” Williams wrote to the reporter. “I believe her to be severely mentally ill and I believe her to be dangerous. For my own safety, I cannot reveal more.”
He saw the article the next morning. The journalist had published 500 words about the disturbing email he’d gotten, complete with a screenshot of Williams’ entire note. Only a few people had joined that meandering call. Surely only Williams pestered the woman about it afterwards. There could be little doubt that he was the mole.
He pulled the go bag from his closet and fled. A few days later, while on the run, Williams recorded the final entries in his diary. Amid the upheaval, he sounded surprised to feel a sense of relief: “I see the light at the end of the tunnel for the first time in two and a half years.”
Coda: Project 2025
It was seven days before the 2024 presidential election. Williams had insisted I not bring my phone, on the off chance my movements were being tracked. We were finally meeting for the first time, in a city that he asked me not to disclose. He entered the cramped hotel room wearing a camo hat, hiking shoes and a “Spy vs. Spy” comic strip T-shirt. “Did you pick the shirt to match the occasion?” I asked. He laughed. “Sometimes I can’t help myself.”
We talked for days, with Williams splayed across a Best Western office chair beside the queen bed. He evoked an aging computer programmer with 100 pounds of muscle attached, and he seemed calmer than on the phone, endearingly offbeat. The vision he laid out — of his own future and of the country’s — was severe.
After he dropped everything and went underground, Williams spent a few weeks in the desert. He threw his phone in a river, flushed documents down the toilet and switched apartments when he returned to civilization. At first, he spent every night by the door ready for an attack; if anyone found him and ambushed him, it’d happen after dark, he figured. No one ever came, and he began to question if he’d needed to flee at all. The insomnia of his undercover years finally abated. He began to sketch out the rest of his life.
Initially, he hoped to connect with lawmakers in Washington, helping them craft legislation to combat the militia movement. By last summer, those ambitions had waned. Over time, he began to wrestle with his gift for deceiving people who trusted him. “I don’t necessarily like what it says about me that I have a talent for this,” he said.
To me, it seemed that the ordeal might be starting to change him. He’d become less precise in consistently adhering to the facts in recent weeks, I thought, more grandiose in his account of his own saga. But then for long stretches, he’d speak with the same introspection and attention to detail that he showed on our first calls. His obsession with keeping the Tyre Nichols protestors safe was myopic, he told me, a case of forgetting the big picture to quash the few dangers he could control.
Williams believes extremists will try to murder him after this story is published. And if they fail, he thinks he’ll “live to see the United States cease to exist.” He identifies with the violent abolitionist John Brown, who tried to start a slave revolt two years before the American Civil War and was executed. Williams thinks he himself may not be seen as such a radical soon, he told me. “I wonder if I’m maybe a little too early.”
I’d thought Williams was considering a return to a quiet life. Our two intense years together had been a strain sometimes even for me. But in the hotel room, he explained his plans for future operations against militias: “Until they kill me, this is what I’m doing.” He hopes to inspire others to follow in his footsteps and even start his own vigilante collective, running his own “agents” inside the far right.
In August, I published my investigation into AP3. (I used his records but did not otherwise rely on Williams as an anonymous source.) It was a way of starting to lay out what I’d learned since his first email: what’s driving the growth of militias, how they keep such a wide range of people united, the dangerous exploits that they’ve managed to keep out of public view.
Two months later, Williams published an anonymous essay. He revealed that he’d infiltrated the group as an “independent activist” and had sent me files. He wanted to test how the militia would respond to news of a mole.
The result was something he long had hoped for: a wave of paranoia inside AP3. “It’s a fucking risky thing we get involved in,” Seddon, the group’s founder, said in a private message. “Fucking trust nobody. There’s fucking turncoats everywhere.” (Seddon declined to comment for this story. He then sent a short follow-up email: “MAGA.”)
Sowing that distrust is why Williams is going on the record, albeit without his original name. He still plans to release thousands of files after this article is published — evidence tying sheriffs and police officers to the movement, his proudest coup, plus other records he hopes could become ammo for lawsuits. But Williams wants to let his former comrades know “a faggot is doing this to them.” He thinks his story could be his most effective weapon.
Every time militia members make a phone call, attend a meeting or go to a gun range together, he wants them “to be thinking, in the back of their heads, ‘This guy will betray me.’”
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2024 fic roundup
i was not tagged but i stole this from @gossippool who kept open tags lol. originally created by @cheeseplants~!
for stats, i'm only answering for the fics i posted on ao3 this year (ie: i'm not including wips or random pieces i posted on tumblr, mainly for clarity)
alrighty, let's go!! /o/
—————
What fandoms do you write in?
mainly deadpool and wolverine + one (1) yuri on ice lol
How many words have you published in 2024?
20,488
an insane amount bc i haven't posted to ao3 since jan 2023
and even then i only started posting again in sept 2024
absolutely wild imo
What is your greatest achievement this year?
to reiterate the above ^^^ point: writing and posting at all
What are your favourite top three fics you wrote this year?
(listed in order of personal preference)
1) You'll be there to push me up the hill • poolverine • 5.4k • Five times Logan finds out something new about Wade's friendships, and one time Wade finds out something new about his relationship with Logan. —— this is my fave fic i've written this year bc it's 100000% self-indulgent and i regret nothing aside from wishing i had it beta'd before i posted lol
2) Feel your way • poolverine • 2.7k • aka: Yet another Honda Odyssey fic lol. —— i still can't believe i wrote and posted smut for the first time in years—and it's not half bad! i feel like a lot of my smut isn't actually as hot as i want it to be 😅😑
3) tanoshii omoide • victuuri • 600+ • In interviews, and generally in public, Yuuri always says his happiest memory is landing his triple axel for the first time. —— i also can't believe this is the first victuuri fic i've ever posted publicly. yoi is the reason why i'm a weeb and i still very deeply adore this anime. perhaps one day i'll share the rest of my victuuri brainworms but who knows! certainly not me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What have you learned?
mainly that i missed writing
i've been stagnant creatively for a long time and completely forgot how much i actually like writing
(no jinx, oh my lord)
What fic did you want to do but never made it off the ground?
omg
so many
i have dozens of wip documents of varying lengths, and even more notes of fic ideas ranging in detail from a single bullet point to "why the hell haven't i just turned this into proper sentences yet bc it's practically written!!!"
one in particular that i think about a lot is a poolverine/cabledom + x-force miscommunication leads to getting together fic
alas, i have not the knowledge nor skill to give this the attention and care it deserves 😩😔
Did you beta any fics?
ye!!
i beta'd this messed up but brilliant bleach fic by @comatose--overdose (tw: rape and deception—tread carefully!)
so fucked up, 10/10, would recommend if you want something messy and hot lol
What ideas are percolating for next year?
once again: so many lol
here's a few off the top of my head: aforementioned poolverine/cabledom miscommunication, professor/student poolverine au, poolverine mind-meld, animalistic!logan poolverine fluff, vanessa clocking that poolverine absolutely fucked on the DL, symbrock missing scenes fic that i didn't finish on time for the premiere of venom: the last dance, continuing my darndest things series, this one jayroy + lian action fic that just will not leave me tf alone........
i can keep going bc i have so many ideas 😅🙃
will i actually get to any of them next year? at this point you can toss a coin in a wishing well and get the same results bc i truly do not know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Who do you want to thank?
big, mega, overly-excited shout out to @comatose--overdose and @broosepayne for beta-ing and idea throwing all goddamn year with me ❤️❤️❤️
i am tackling each of you to the ground and crushing you with my my arms Ɛ=Ɛ=Ɛ=(づ ̄ ³ ̄)づ
tagging: if you have the letters S, A, and/or F in your url, consider yourself officially tagged! (-ω-)ゝ
#jercy speaks#jercy attempts words#actual blogging#2024 fic roundup#.yes it's another fic challenge no one actually asked me to do—i am vain enough to wanna answer these questions for myself lol
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Credit To ProPublica (https://www.propublica.org/article/ap3-oath-keepers-militia-mole)
The Militia and the Mole
by Joshua Kaplan
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Reporting Highlights
A Freelance Vigilante: A wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell his family or friends.
The Future of Militias: He penetrated a new generation of militia leaders, which included doctors and government attorneys. Experts say that militias could have a renaissance under Donald Trump.
A Secret Trove: He sent ProPublica a massive trove of documents. The conversations that he secretly recorded give a unique, startling window into the militia movement.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
John Williams kept a backpack filled with everything he’d need to go on the run: three pairs of socks; a few hundred dollars cash; makeshift disguises and lock-picking gear; medical supplies, vitamins and high-calorie energy gels; and thumb drives that each held more than 100 gigabytes of encrypted documents, which he would quickly distribute if he were about to be arrested or killed.
On April 1, 2023, Williams retrieved the bag from his closet and rushed to his car. He had no time to clean the dishes that had accumulated in his apartment. He did not know if armed men were out looking for him. He did not know if he would ever feel safe to return. He parked his car for the night in the foothills overlooking Salt Lake City and curled up his 6-foot-4-inch frame in the back seat of the 20-year-old Honda. This was his new home.
He turned on a recording app to add an entry to his diary. His voice had the high-pitched rasp of a lifelong smoker: “Where to fucking start,” he sighed, taking a deep breath. After more than two years undercover, he’d been growing rash and impulsive. He had feared someone was in danger and tried to warn him, but it backfired. Williams was sure at least one person knew he was a double agent now, he said into his phone. “It’s only a matter of time before it gets back to the rest.”
In the daylight, Williams dropped an envelope with no return address in a U.S. Postal Service mailbox. He’d loaded it with a flash drive and a gold Oath Keepers medallion.
It was addressed to me.
The documents laid out a remarkable odyssey. Posing as an ideological compatriot, Williams had penetrated the top ranks of two of the most prominent right-wing militias in the country. He’d slept in the home of the man who claims to be the new head of the Oath Keepers, rifling through his files in the middle of the night. He’d devised elaborate ruses to gather evidence of militias’ ties to high-ranking law enforcement officials. He’d uncovered secret operations like the surveillance of a young journalist, then improvised ways to sabotage the militants’ schemes. In one group, his ploys were so successful that he became the militia’s top commander in the state of Utah.
Now he was a fugitive. He drove south toward a desert four hours from the city, where he could disappear.
1. Prelude
I’d first heard from Williams five months earlier, when he sent me an intriguing but mysterious anonymous email. “I have been attempting to contact national media and civil rights groups for over a year and been ignored,” it read. “I’m tired of yelling into the void.” He sent it to an array of reporters. I was the only one to respond. I’ve burned a lot of time sating my curiosity about emails like that. I expected my interest to die after a quick call. Instead, I came to occupy a dizzying position as the only person to know the secret Williams had been harboring for almost two years.
We spoke a handful of times over encrypted calls before he fled. He’d been galvanized by the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol, Williams told me, when militias like the Oath Keepers conspired to violently overturn the 2020 presidential election. He believed democracy was under siege from groups the FBI has said pose a major domestic terrorism threat. So he infiltrated the militia movement on spec, as a freelance vigilante. He did not tell the police or the FBI. A loner, he did not tell his family or friends.
Williams seemed consumed with how to ensure this wasn’t all a self-destructive, highly dangerous waste of time. He distrusted law enforcement and didn’t want to be an informant, he said. He told me he hoped to damage the movement by someday going public with what he’d learned.
The Capitol riot had been nagging at me too. I’d reported extensively on Jan. 6. I’d sat with families who blamed militias for snatching their loved ones away from them, pulling them into a life of secret meetings and violent plots — or into a jail cell. By the time Williams contacted me, though, the most infamous groups appeared to have largely gone dark. Were militias more enduring, more potent, than it seemed?
Some of what he told me seemed significant. Still, before the package arrived, it could feel like I was corresponding with a shadow. I knew Williams treated deception as an art form. “When you spin a lie,” he once told me, “you have to have things they can verify so they won’t think to ask questions.” While his stories generally seemed precise and sober — always reassuring for a journalist — I needed to proceed with extreme skepticism.
So I pored over his files, tens of thousands of them. They included dozens of hours of conversations he secretly recorded and years of private militia chat logs and videos. I was able to authenticate those through other sources, in and out of the movement. I also talked to dozens of people, from Williams’ friends to other members of his militias. I dug into his tumultuous past and discovered records online he hadn’t pointed me to that supported his account.
The files give a unique window, at once expansive and intimate, into one of the most consequential and volatile social movements of our time. Williams penetrated a new generation of paramilitary leaders, which included doctors, career cops and government attorneys. Sometimes they were frightening, sometimes bumbling, always heavily armed. It was a world where a man would propose assassinating politicians, only to spark a debate about logistics.
Federal prosecutors have convicted more than 1,000 people for their role in Jan. 6. Key militia captains were sent to prison for a decade or more. But that did not quash the allure that militias hold for a broad swath of Americans.
Now President-elect Donald Trump has promised to pardon Jan. 6 rioters when he returns to the White House. Experts warn that such a move could trigger a renaissance for militant extremists, sending them an unprecedented message of protection and support — and making it all the more urgent to understand them.
(Unless otherwise noted, none of the militia members mentioned in this story responded to requests for comment.)
Williams is part of a larger cold war, radical vs. radical, that’s stayed mostly in the shadows. A left-wing activist told me he personally knows about 30 people who’ve gone undercover in militias or white supremacist groups. They did not coordinate with law enforcement, instead taking the surveillance of one of the most intractable features of American politics into their own hands.
Skeptical of authorities, militias have sought to reshape the country through armed action. Williams sought to do it through betrayals and lies, which sat with him uneasily. “I couldn’t have been as successful at this if I wasn’t one of them in some respects,” he once told me. “I couldn’t have done it so long unless they recognized something in me.”
2. The Struggle
If there is one moment that set Williams on his path into the militia underground, it came roughly a decade before Jan. 6, when he was sent to a medium-security prison. He was in his early 30s, drawn to danger and filled with an inner turbulence.
Williams grew up in what he described to me, to friends and in court records as a dysfunctional and unhappy home. He was a gay child in rural America. His father viewed homosexuality as a mortal sin, he said. Williams spent much of his childhood outdoors, bird-watching, camping and trying to spend as little time as possible at home. (John Williams is now his legal name, one he recently acquired.)
Once he was old enough to move out, Williams continued to go off the grid for weeks at a time. Living in a cave interested him; the jobs he’d found at grocery stores and sandwich shops did not. He told me his young adulthood was “a blank space in my life,” a stretch of “petty crime” and falling-outs with old friends. He pled guilty to a series of misdemeanors: trespassing, criminal mischief, assault.
What landed Williams in prison was how he responded to one of those arrests. He sent disturbing, anonymous emails to investigators on the case, threatening their families. Police traced the messages back to him and put him away for three years.
Williams found time to read widely in prison — natural history books, Bertrand Russell, Cormac McCarthy. And it served as a finishing school for a skill that would be crucial in his undercover years. Surviving prison meant learning to maneuver around gang leaders and corrections officers. He learned how to steer conversations to his own benefit without the other person noticing.
When he got out, he had a clear ambition: to become a wilderness survival instructor. He used Facebook to advertise guided hikes in Utah’s Uinta Mountains. An old photo captures Williams looking like a lanky camp counselor as he shows students an edible plant. He sports a thick ponytail and cargo pants, painted toenails poking out from his hiking sandals.
Many people in Utah had turned to wilderness survival after a personal crisis, forming a community of misfits who thrived in environments harsh and remote. Even among them, Williams earned a reputation for putting himself in extreme situations. “Not many people are willing to struggle on their own. He takes that struggle to a high degree,” one friend told me admiringly. Williams took up krav maga and muay thai because he enjoyed fistfights. He once spent 40 days alone in the desert with only a knife, living off chipmunks and currants (by choice, to celebrate a birthday).
Williams struggled to get his survival business going. He’d hand out business cards at hobbyist gatherings with promises of adventure, but in practice, he was mostly leading seminars in city parks for beer money. He would only take calls in emergencies, another friend recalled, because he wanted to save money on minutes.
Then around New Year’s in 2019, according to Williams, he received an email from a leader in American Patriots Three Percent, or AP3. He wanted to hire Williams for a training session. He could pay $1,000.
Finally, Williams thought. I’m starting to get some traction.
3. The Decision
They had agreed there’d be no semiautomatic rifles, Williams told me, so everyone brought a sidearm. Some dozen militiamen had driven into the mountains near Peter Sinks, Utah, one of the coldest places in the contiguous U.S. Initially they wanted training in evasion and escape, Williams said, but he thought they needed to work up to that. So for three days, he taught them the basics of wilderness survival, but with a twist: how to stay alive while “trying to stay hidden.” He showed them how to build a shelter that would both keep them dry and escape detection. How to make a fire, then how to clean it up so no one could tell it was ever there.
As the days wore on, stray comments started to irk him. Once, a man said he’d been “kiked” into overpaying for his Ruger handgun. At the end of the training, AP3 leaders handed out matching patches. The ritual reminded Williams of a biker gang.
He’d already been to some shorter AP3 events to meet the men and tailor the lesson to his first meaningful client, Williams told me. But spending days in the woods with them felt different. He said he found the experience unpleasant and decided not to work with the group again.
This portion of Williams’ story — exactly how and why he first became a militia member — is the hardest to verify. By his own account, he kept his thoughts and plans entirely to himself. At the time, he was too embarrassed to even tell his friends what happened that weekend, he said. In the survival community, training militias was considered taboo.
I couldn’t help but wonder if Williams was hiding a less gallant backstory. Maybe he’d joined AP3 out of genuine enthusiasm and then soured on it. Maybe now he was trying to fool me. Indeed, when I called the AP3 leader who set up the training, he disputed Williams’ timeline. He remembered Williams staying sporadically but consistently involved after the session in the mountains, as a friend of the group who attended two or three events a year. To further muddy the picture, Williams had warned me the man would say something like that — Williams had worked hard to create the impression that he never left, he said, that he’d just gone inactive for a while, busy with work. (Remarkably, the AP3er defended Williams’ loyalty each time I asserted he’d secretly tried to undermine the group. “He was very well-respected,” he said. “I never questioned his honesty or his intentions.”)
Even Williams’ friends told me he was something of a mystery to them. But I found evidence that supports his story where so many loners bare their innermost thoughts: the internet. In 2019 and early 2020, Williams wrote thousands of since-deleted entries in online forums. These posts delivered a snapshot of his worldview in this period: idiosyncratic, erudite and angry with little room for moderation. “There are occasionally militia types that want these skills to further violent fringe agendas and I will absolutely not enable them,” he wrote in one 2020 entry about wilderness survival. In another, he called AP3 and its allies “far right lunatics.” The posts didn’t prove the details of his account, but here was the Williams I knew, writing under pseudonyms long before we’d met.
One day, he’d voice his disdain for Trump voters, neoliberalism or “the capitalist infrastructure.” Another, he’d rail against gun control measures as immoral. When Black Lives Matter protests broke out in 2020, Williams wrote that he was gathering medical supplies for local protestors. He sounded at times like a revolutionary crossed with a left-wing liberal arts student. “The sole job of a cop is to bully citizens on behalf of the state,” he wrote. “Violent overthrow of the state is our only viable option.”
Then came Jan. 6. As he was watching on TV, he later told me, Williams thought he recognized the patch on a rioter’s tactical vest. It looked like the one that AP3 leaders had handed out at the end of his training.
Did I teach that guy? he wondered. Why was I so cordial to them all?If they knew I was gay, I bet they’d want me dead, and I actually helped them. Because I was too selfish to think of anything but my career.
Shame quickly turned to anger, he told me, and to a desire for revenge. Pundits were saying that democracy itself was in mortal peril. Williams took that notion literally. He assumed countless Americans would respond with aggressive action, he said, and he wanted to be among them.
4. A New World
Williams stood alone in his apartment, watching himself in the mirror.
“I’m tall.”
“I’m Dave.”
“I’m tall.”
“I’m Dave.”
He tried to focus on his mannerisms, on the intonation of his voice. Whether he was saying the truth or a falsehood, he wanted to appear exactly the same.
Months had passed since the Capitol riot. By all appearances, Williams was now an enthusiastic member of AP3. Because he already had an in, joining the group was easy, he said. Becoming a self-fashioned spy took some trial and error, however. In the early days, he had posed as a homeless person to surveil militia training facilities, but he decided that was a waste of time.
The casual deceit that had served him in prison was proving useful. Deviousness was a skill, and he stayed up late working to hone it. He kept a journal with every lie he told so he wouldn’t lose track. His syllabus centered on acting exercises and the history of espionage and cults. People like sex cult leader Keith Raniere impressed him most — he studied biographies to learn how they manipulated people, how they used cruelty to wear their followers down into acquiescence.
Williams regularly berated the militia’s rank and file. He doled out condescending advice about the group’s security weaknesses, warning their technical incompetence would make them easy targets for left-wing hackers and government snoops. Orion Rollins, the militia’s top leader in Utah, soon messaged Williams to thank him for the guidance. “Don’t worry about being a dick,” he wrote. “It’s time to learn and become as untraceable as possible.” (The AP3 messages Williams sent me were so voluminous that I spent an entire month reading them before I noticed this exchange.)
Williams was entering the militia at a pivotal time. AP3 once had chapters in nearly every state, with a roster likely in the tens of thousands; as authorities cracked down on the movement after Jan. 6, membership was plummeting. Some who stayed on had white nationalist ties. Others were just lonely conservatives who had found purpose in the paramilitary cause. For now, the group’s leaders were focused on saving the militia, not taking up arms to fight their enemies. (Thanks to Williams’ trove and records from several other sources, I was eventually able to write an investigation into AP3’s resurgence.)
On March 4, 2021, Williams complained to Rollins that everyone was still ignoring his advice. Williams volunteered to take over as the state’s “intel officer,” responsible for protecting the group from outside scrutiny.
“My hands are tied,” Williams wrote. “If I’m not able to” take charge, the whole militia “might unravel.” Rollins gave him the promotion.
“Thanks Orion. You’ve shown good initiative here.” Privately, he saw a special advantage to his appointment. If anyone suspected there was a mole in Utah, Williams would be the natural choice to lead the mole hunt.
Now he had a leadership role. What he did not yet have was a plan. But how could he decide on goals, he figured, until he knew more about AP3? He would work to gather information and rise through the ranks by being the best militia member he could be.
He took note of the job titles of leaders he met, like an Air Force reserve master sergeant (I confirmed this through military records) who recruited other airmen into the movement. Williams attended paramilitary trainings, where the group practiced ambushes with improvised explosives and semiautomatic guns. He offered his comrades free lessons in hand-to-hand combat and bonded with them in the backcountry hunting jackrabbits. When the militia joined right-wing rallies for causes like gun rights, they went in tactical gear. Williams attended as their “gray man,” he said — assigned to blend in with the crowd and call in armed reinforcements if tensions erupted.
Since his work was seasonal, Williams could spend as much as 40 hours a week on militia activities. One of his duties as intel officer was to monitor the group’s enemies on the left, which could induce vertigo. A militia leader once dispatched him to a Democratic Socialists of America meeting at a local library, he said, where he saw a Proud Boy he recognized from a joint militia training. Was this a closet right-winger keeping tabs on the socialists? Or a closet leftist who might dox him or inform the police?
He first contacted me in October 2022. He couldn’t see how the movement was changing beyond his corner of Utah. AP3 was reinvigorated by then, I later found, with as many as 50 recruits applying each day. In private chats I reviewed, leaders were debating if they should commit acts of terrorism. At the Texas border, members were rounding up immigrants in armed patrols. But Williams didn’t know all that yet. On our first call, he launched into a litany of minutiae: names, logistical details, allegations of minor players committing petty crimes. He could tell I wasn’t sure what it all amounted to.
Williams feared that if anything he’d helped AP3, not damaged it. Then, in early November, Rollins told him to contact a retired detective named Bobby Kinch.
5. The Detective and the Sheriff
Williams turned on a recording device and dialed. Kinch picked up after one ring: “What’s going on?” he bellowed. “How you doing, man?”
“I don’t know if you remember me,” Kinch continued, but they’d met years before.
“Oh, oh, back in the day,” Williams said, stuttering for a second. He knew Kinch was expecting the call but was confused by the warm reception. Maybe Kinch was at the training in 2019?
“Well I’m the sitting, current national director of the Oath Keepers now.”
The militia’s eye-patched founder, Stewart Rhodes, was in jail amid his trial for conspiring to overthrow the government on Jan. 6. Kinch said he was serving on the group’s national board when his predecessor was arrested. Rhodes had called from jail to say, “Do not worry about me. This is God’s way.”
“He goes, ‘But I want you to save the organization.’”
Kinch explained that Rollins, who’d recently defected to the Oath Keepers, had been singing Williams’ praises. (Bound by shared ideology, militias are more porous than outsiders would think. Members often cycle between groups like square dance partners.) “I imagine your plate is full with all the crazy stuff going on in the world, but I’d love to sit down.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Williams said. “AP3 and Oath Keepers should definitely be working together.” He proposed forming a joint reconnaissance team so their two militias could collaborate on intelligence operations. Kinch lit up. “I’m a career cop,” he said. “I did a lot of covert stuff, surveillance.”
By the time they hung up 45 minutes later, Kinch had invited Williams to come stay at his home. Williams felt impressed with himself. The head of the most infamous militia in America was treating him like an old friend.
To me, Williams sounded like a different person on the call, with the same voice but a brand new personality. It was the first recording that I listened to and the first time I became certain the most important part of his story was true. To authenticate the record, I independently confirmed nonpublic details Kinch discussed on the tape, a process I repeated again and again with the other files. Soon I had proof of what would otherwise seem outlandish: Williams’ access was just as deep as he claimed.
I could see why people would be eager to follow Kinch. Even when he sermonized on the “global elitist cabal,” he spoke with the affable passion of a beloved high school teacher. I’d long been fascinated by the prevalence of cops on militia rosters, so I started examining his backstory.
Kinch grew up in upstate New York, the son of a World War II veteran who had him at about 50. When Kinch was young, he confided in a later recording, he was a “wheelman,” slang for getaway driver. “I ran from the cops so many fucking times,” he said. But “at the end of the day, you know, I got away. I never got caught.”
He moved to Las Vegas and, at the age of 25, became an officer in the metro police. Kinch came to serve in elite detective units over 23 years in the force, hunting fugitives and helping take down gangs like the Playboy Bloods. Eventually he was assigned to what he called the “Black squad,” according to court records, tasked with investigating violent crimes where the suspect was African American. (A Las Vegas police spokesperson told me they stopped “dividing squads by a suspect’s race” a year before Kinch retired.)
Then around Christmas in 2013, Kinch’s career began to self-destruct. In a series of Facebook posts, he said that he would welcome a “race war.” “Bring it!” he wrote. “I’m about as fed up as a man (American, Christian, White, Heterosexual) can get!” An ensuing investigation prompted the department to tell the Secret Service that Kinch “could be a threat to the president,” according to the Las Vegas Sun. (The Secret Service interviewed him and determined he was not a threat to President Barack Obama, the outlet reported. Kinch told the paper he was not racist and that he was being targeted by colleagues with “an ax to grind.”) In 2016, he turned in his badge, a year after the saga broke in the local press.
Kinch moved to southern Utah and found a job hawking hunting gear at a Sportsman’s Warehouse. But he “had this urge,” he later said on a right-wing podcast. “Like I wasn’t done yet.” So he joined the Oath Keepers. “When people tell me that violence doesn’t solve anything, I look back over my police career,” he once advised his followers. “And I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, because violence did solve quite a bit.’”
Kinch added Williams to an encrypted Signal channel where the Utah Oath Keepers coordinated their intel work. Two weeks later on Nov. 30, 2022, Williams received a cryptic message from David Coates, one of Kinch’s top deputies.
Coates was an elder statesman of sorts in the Oath Keepers, a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran with a Hulk Hogan mustache. There’d been a break-in at the Utah attorney general’s office, he reported to the group, and for some unspoken reason, the Oath Keepers seemed to think this was of direct relevance to them. Coates promised to find out more about the burglary: “The Sheriff should have some answers” to “my inquiries today or tomorrow.”
That last line would come to obsess Williams. He sent a long, made-up note about his own experiences collaborating with law enforcement officials. “I’m curious, how responsive is the Sheriff to your inquiries? Or do you have a source you work with?”
“The Sheriff has become a personal friend who hosted my FBI interview,” Coates responded. “He opens a lot of doors.” Coates had been in D.C. on Jan. 6, he’d told Williams. It’d make sense if that had piqued the FBI’s interest.
To Williams, it hinted at a more menacing scenario — at secret ties between those who threaten the rule of the law and those duty-bound to enforce it. He desperately wanted more details, more context, the sheriff’s name. But he didn’t want to push for too much too fast.
6. The Hunting of Man
A forest engulfed Kinch’s house on all sides. He lived in a half-million-dollar cabin in summer home country, up 8,000 feet in the mountains outside Zion National Park. Williams stood in the kitchen on a mid-December Saturday morning.
Williams had recently made a secret purchase of a small black device off Amazon. It looked like a USB drive. The on-off switch and microphone holes revealed what it really was: a bug. As the two men chatted over cups of cannoli-flavored coffee, Williams didn’t notice when Kinch’s dog snatched the bug from his bag.
The night before, Williams had slept in the guest room. The house was cluttered with semiautomatic rifles. He had risked photographing three plaques on the walls inscribed with the same Ernest Hemingway line. “There is no hunting like the hunting of man,” they read. “Those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else.”
They spotted the dog at the same time. The bug was attached to a charging device. The animal was running around with it like it was a tennis ball. As Kinch went to retrieve it, Williams felt panic grip his chest. Could anyone talk their way out of this? He’d learned enough about Kinch to be terrified of his rage. Looking around, Williams eyed his host’s handgun on the kitchen counter.
If he even starts to examine it, I’ll grab the gun, he thought. Then I’ll shoot him and flee into the woods.
Kinch took the bug from the dog’s mouth. Then he handed it right to Williams and started to apologize.
Don’t worry about it, Williams said. He’s a puppy!
On their way out the door, Kinch grabbed the pistol and placed it in the console of his truck. It was an hour’s drive to the nearest city, where the Oath Keepers were holding a leadership meeting. Williams rode shotgun, his bug hooked onto the zipper of his backpack. On the tape, I could hear the wind racing through the car window. The radio played Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69.”
Kinch seemed in the hold of a dark nostalgia — as if he was wrestling with the monotony of civilian life, with the new strictures he faced since turning in his badge. Twenty minutes in, he recited the Hemingway line like it was a mantra. “I have a harder time killing animals than a human being,” Kinch continued. Then he grew quiet as he recounted the night he decided to retire.
He’d woken up in an oleander bush with no memory of how he’d gotten there. His hands were covered in blood. He was holding a gun. “I had to literally take my magazine out and count my bullets, make sure I didn’t fucking kill somebody,” he said. “I black out when I get angry. And I don’t remember what the fuck I did.”
Kinch went on: “I love the adrenaline of police work,” and then he paused. “I miss it. It was a hoot.”
By the time they reached Cedar City, Utah, Kinch was back to charismatic form. He dished out compliments to the dozen or so Oath Keepers assembled for the meeting — “You look like you lost weight” — and told everyone to put their phones in their cars. “It’s just good practice. Because at some point we may have to go down a route,” one of his deputies explained, trailing off.
Kinch introduced Williams to the group. “He’s not the feds. And if he is, he’s doing a damn good job.”
Williams laughed, a little too loud.
7. Doctor, Lawyer, Sergeant, Spy
Early in the meeting, Kinch laid out his vision for the Oath Keepers’ role in American life. “We have a two-edged sword,” he said. The “dull edge” was more traditional grassroots work, exemplified by efforts to combat alleged election fraud. He hoped to build their political apparatus so that in five or 10 years, conservative candidates would be seeking the Oath Keepers’ endorsement.
Then there was the sharp edge: paramilitary training. “You hone all these skills because when the dull edge fails, you’ve got to be able to turn that around and be sharp.” The room smelled like donuts, one of the men had remarked.
The week before, Kinch’s predecessor had been convicted of seditious conspiracy. This was their first meeting since the verdict, and I opened the recordings later with the same anticipation I feel sitting down for the Super Bowl. What would come next for the militia after this historic trial: ruin, recovery or revolt?
The stature of men leading the group’s post-Jan. 6 resurrection startled me. I was expecting the ex-cops, like the one from Fresno, California, who said he stayed on with the militia because “this defines me.” Militias tend to prize law enforcement ties; during an armed operation, it could be useful to have police see you as a friend.
But there was also an Ohio OB-GYN on the national board of directors — he used to work for the Cleveland Clinic, I discovered, and now led a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group. The doctor was joined at board meetings by a city prosecutor in Utah, an ex-city council member and, Williams was later told, a sergeant with an Illinois sheriff’s department. (The doctor did not respond to requests for comment. He has since left his post with the UnitedHealth subsidiary, a spokesperson for the company said.)
Over six hours, the men set goals and delegated responsibilities with surprisingly little worry about the federal crackdown on militias. They discussed the scourges they were there to combat (stolen elections, drag shows, President Joe Biden) only in asides. Instead, they focused on “marketing” — “So what buzzwords can we insert in our mission statement?” one asked — and on resources that’d help local chapters rapidly expand. “I’d like to see this organization be like the McDonald’s of patriot organizations,” another added. To Williams, it felt more like a Verizon sales meeting than an insurrectionist cell.
Kinch had only recently taken over and as I listened, I wondered how many followers he really had outside of that room. They hadn’t had a recruitment drive in the past year, which they resolved to change. They had $1,700 in the bank. But it didn’t seem entirely bravado. Kinch and his comrades mentioned conversations with chapters around the county.
Then as they turned from their weakened national presence to their recent successes in Utah, Williams snapped to attention.
“We had surveillance operations,” Kinch said, without elaboration.
“We’re making progress locally on the law enforcement,” Coates added. He said that at least three of them can get “the sheriff” on the phone any time of day. Like the last time, Coates didn’t give a name, but he said something even more intriguing: “The sheriff is my tie-in to the state attorney general because he’s friends.” Williams told me he fought the urge to lob a question. (The attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)
Closing out the day, Kinch summarized their plan moving forward: Keep a low profile. Focus on the unglamorous work. Rebuild their national footprint. And patiently prepare for 2024. “We still got what, two more years, till another quote unquote election?” He thanked Williams for coming and asked if they could start planning training exercises.
“Absolutely, yeah, I’m excited about that.” Williams was resolved to find his way onto the national board.
8. The Stakeout
On Dec. 17, 2022, a week after the meeting, Williams called a tech-savvy 19-year-old Oath Keeper named Rowan. He’d told Rowan he was going to teach him to infiltrate leftist groups, but Williams’ real goal was far more underhanded. While the older Oath Keepers had demurred at his most sensitive questions recently, the teenager seemed eager to impress a grizzled survival instructor. By assigning missions to Rowan, he hoped to probe the militias’ secrets without casting suspicion on himself.
“You don’t quite have the life experience to do this,” Williams opened on the recording. But with a couple years’ training, “I think we can work towards that goal.” He assigned his student a scholarly monograph, “Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society,” to begin his long education in how leftists think. “Perfect,” Rowan responded. He paused to write the title down.
Then came his pupil’s first exercise: build a dossier on Williams’ boss in AP3. Williams explained it was safest to practice on people they knew.
In Rowan, Williams had found a particularly vulnerable target. He was on probation at the time. According to court records, earlier that year, Rowan had walked up to a stranger’s truck as she was leaving her driveway. She rolled down her window. He punched her several times in the face. When police arrived, Rowan began screaming that he was going to kill them and threatened to “blow up the police department.” He was convicted of misdemeanor assault.
Williams felt guilty about using the young man but also excited. (“He is completely in my palm,” he recorded in his diary.) Within a few weeks, he had Rowan digging into Kinch’s background. “I’m going to gradually have him do more and more things,” he said in the diary, “with the hopes that I can eventually get him to hack” into militia leaders’ accounts.
The relationship quickly unearthed something that disturbed him. The week of their call, Williams woke up to a series of angry messages in the Oath Keepers’ encrypted Signal channel. The ire was directed toward a Salt Lake Tribune reporter who, according to Coates, was “a real piece of shit.” His sins included critical coverage of “anyone trying to expose voter fraud” and writing about a local political figure who’d appeared on a leaked Oath Keepers roster.
Williams messaged Rowan. “I noticed in the chat that there is some kind of red list of journalists etc? Could you get that to me?” he asked. “It would be very helpful to my safety when observing political rallies or infiltrating leftists.”
“Ah yes, i have doxes on many journalists in utah,” Rowan responded, using slang for sharing someone’s personal data with malicious intent.
He sent over a dossier on the Tribune reporter, which opened with a brief manifesto: “This dox goes out to those that have been terrorized, doxed, harassed, slandered, and family names mutilated by these people.” It provided the reporter’s address and phone number, along with two pictures of his house.
Then Rowan shared similar documents about a local film critic — he’d posted a “snarky” retweet of the Tribune writer — and about a student reporter at Southern Utah University. The college student had covered a rally the Oath Keepers recently attended, Rowan explained, and the militia believed he was coordinating with the Tribune. “We found the car he drove through a few other members that did a stakeout.”
“That’s awesome,” Williams said. Internally, he was reeling: a stakeout? In the dossier, he found a backgrounder on the student’s parents along with their address. Had armed men followed this kid around? Did they surveil his family home?
His notes show him wrestling with a decision he hadn’t let himself reckon with before: Was it time to stop being a fly on the wall and start taking action? Did he need to warn someone? The journalists? The police? Breaking character would open the door to disaster. The incident with Kinch’s dog had been a chilling reminder of the risks.
Williams had been in the militia too long. He was losing his sense of objectivity. The messages were alarming, but were they an imminent threat? He couldn’t tell. Williams had made plans to leave Utah if his cover was blown. He didn’t want to jeopardize two years of effort over a false alarm. But what if he did nothing and this kid got hurt?
9. The Plan
By 2023, Williams’ responsibilities were expanding as rapidly as his anxiety. His schedule was packed with events for AP3, the Oath Keepers and a third militia he’d recently gotten inside. He vowed to infiltrate the Proud Boys and got Coates to vouch for him with the local chapter. He prepared plans to penetrate a notorious white supremacist group too.
His adversaries were gaining momentum as well. Williams soon made the four-hour drive to Kinch’s house for another leadership meeting and was told on tape about a national Oath Keepers recruiting bump; they’d also found contact information for 40,000 former members, which they hoped to use to bring a flood of militiamen back into the fold.
Despite the risk to his own safety and progress, Williams decided to send the journalists anonymous warnings from burner accounts. He attached sensitive screenshots so that they’d take him seriously. And then … nothing. The reporters never responded; he wondered if the messages went to spam. His secret was still secure.
But the point of his mission was finally coming into focus. He was done simply playing the part of model militia member. His plan had two parts: After gathering as much compromising information as he could, he would someday release it all online, he told me. He carefully documented anything that looked legally questionable, hoping law enforcement would find something useful for a criminal case. At the very least, going public could make militiamen more suspicious of each other.
In the meantime, he would undermine the movement from the inside. He began trying to blunt the danger that he saw lurking in every volatile situation the militiamen put themselves in.
On Jan. 27, 2023, body camera footage from the police killing of Tyre Nichols, an unarmed Black man, became public. “The footage is gruesome and distressing,” The New York Times reported. “Cities across the U.S. are bracing for protests.” The militias had often responded to Black Lives Matter rallies with street brawls and armed patrols.
Williams had visions of Kyle Rittenhouse-esque shootings in the streets. He put his newly formulated strategy into action, sending messages to militiamen around the country with made-up rumors he hoped would persuade them to stay home.
In Utah, he wrote to Kinch and the leaders of his other two militias. He would be undercover at the protests in Salt Lake City, he wrote. If any militiamen went, even “a brief look of recognition could blow my cover and put my life in danger.” All three ordered their troops to avoid the event. (“This is a bit of a bummer,” one AP3 member responded. “I’ve got some aggression built up I need to let out.”)
After the protests, Williams turned on his voice diary and let out a long sigh. For weeks, he’d been nauseous and had trouble eating. He’d developed insomnia that would keep him up until dawn. He’d gone to the rally to watch for militia activity. When he got home, he’d vomited blood.
Even grocery shopping took hours now. He circled the aisles to check if he was being tailed. Once while driving, he thought he caught someone following him. He’d reached out to a therapist to help “relieve some of this pressure,” he said, but was afraid to speak candidly with him. “I can check his office for bugs and get his electronics out of the office. And then once we’re free, I can tell him what’s going on.”
He quickly launched into a litany of items on his to-do list. A training exercise to attend. A recording device he needed to find a way to install. “I’m just fucking sick of being around these toxic motherfuckers.”
“It’s getting to be too much for me.”
10. The Deep State
On March 20, Williams called Scot Seddon, the founder of AP3. If he was on the verge of a breakdown, it didn’t impact his performance. I could tell when Williams was trying to advance his agenda as I listened later, but he was subtle about it. Obsequious. Methodical. By day’s end, he’d achieved perhaps his most remarkable feat yet. He’d helped persuade Seddon and his lieutenants to fire the head of AP3’s Utah chapter and to install Williams in his place.
Now he had access to sensitive records only senior militia leaders could see. He had final say over the group’s actions in an entire state. He knew the coup would make him vastly more effective. Yet that night in his voice diary, Williams sounded like a man in despair.
The success only added to his paranoia. Becoming a major figure in the Utah militia scene raised a possibility he couldn’t countenance: He might be arrested and sent to jail for some action of his comrades.
With a sense of urgency now, he focused even more intently on militia ties to government authorities. “I have been still collecting evidence on the paramilitaries’ use of law enforcement,” he said in the diary entry. “It’s way deeper than I thought.”
He solved the mystery of the Oath Keepers’ “sheriff”: It was the sheriff for Iron County, Utah, a tourist hub near two national parks. He assigned Rowan to dig deeper into the official’s ties with the movement and come back with emails or text messages. (In a recent interview, the sheriff told me that he declined an offer to join the Oath Keepers but that he’s known “quite a few” members and thinks “they’re generally good people.” Coates has periodically contacted him about issues like firearms rules that Coates believes are unconstitutional, the sheriff said. “If I agree, I contact the attorney general’s office.”)
Claiming to work on “a communication strategy for reaching out to law enforcement,” Williams then goaded AP3 members into bragging about their police connections. They told him about their ties with high-ranking officers in Missouri and in Louisiana, in Texas and in Tennessee.
The revelations terrified him. “When this gets out, I think I’m probably going to flee overseas,” he said in his diary. “They have too many connections.” What if a cop ally helped militants track him down? “I don’t think I can safely stay within the United States.”
Four days later, he tuned into a Zoom seminar put on by a fellow AP3 leader. It was a rambling and sparsely attended meeting. But 45 minutes in, a woman brought up an issue in her Virginia hometown, population 23,000.
The town’s vice mayor, a proud election denier, was under fire for a homophobic remark. She believed a local reporter covering the controversy was leading a secret far-left plot. What’s more, the reporter happened to be her neighbor. To intimidate her, she said, he’d been leaving dead animals on her lawn.
“I think I have to settle a score with this guy,” she concluded. “They’re getting down to deep state local level and it’s got to be stopped.” After the call, Williams went to turn off his recording device. “Well, that was fucking insane,” he said aloud.
He soon reached out to the woman to offer his advice. Maybe he could talk her down, Williams thought, or at least determine what she meant by settling a score. But she wasn’t interested in speaking with him. So again he faced a choice: do nothing or risk his cover being blown. He finally came to the same conclusion he had the last time he’d feared journalists were in jeopardy. On March 31, he sent an anonymous warning.
“Because she is a member of a right wing militia group and is heavily armed, I wanted to let you know,” Williams wrote to the reporter. “I believe her to be severely mentally ill and I believe her to be dangerous. For my own safety, I cannot reveal more.”
He saw the article the next morning. The journalist had published 500 words about the disturbing email he’d gotten, complete with a screenshot of Williams’ entire note. Only a few people had joined that meandering call. Surely only Williams pestered the woman about it afterwards. There could be little doubt that he was the mole.
He pulled the go bag from his closet and fled. A few days later, while on the run, Williams recorded the final entries in his diary. Amid the upheaval, he sounded surprised to feel a sense of relief: “I see the light at the end of the tunnel for the first time in two and a half years.”
Coda: Project 2025
It was seven days before the 2024 presidential election. Williams had insisted I not bring my phone, on the off chance my movements were being tracked. We were finally meeting for the first time, in a city that he asked me not to disclose. He entered the cramped hotel room wearing a camo hat, hiking shoes and a “Spy vs. Spy” comic strip T-shirt. “Did you pick the shirt to match the occasion?” I asked. He laughed. “Sometimes I can’t help myself.”
We talked for days, with Williams splayed across a Best Western office chair beside the queen bed. He evoked an aging computer programmer with 100 pounds of muscle attached, and he seemed calmer than on the phone, endearingly offbeat. The vision he laid out — of his own future and of the country’s — was severe.
After he dropped everything and went underground, Williams spent a few weeks in the desert. He threw his phone in a river, flushed documents down the toilet and switched apartments when he returned to civilization. At first, he spent every night by the door ready for an attack; if anyone found him and ambushed him, it’d happen after dark, he figured. No one ever came, and he began to question if he’d needed to flee at all. The insomnia of his undercover years finally abated. He began to sketch out the rest of his life.
Initially, he hoped to connect with lawmakers in Washington, helping them craft legislation to combat the militia movement. By last summer, those ambitions had waned. Over time, he began to wrestle with his gift for deceiving people who trusted him. “I don’t necessarily like what it says about me that I have a talent for this,” he said.
To me, it seemed that the ordeal might be starting to change him. He’d become less precise in consistently adhering to the facts in recent weeks, I thought, more grandiose in his account of his own saga. But then for long stretches, he’d speak with the same introspection and attention to detail that he showed on our first calls. His obsession with keeping the Tyre Nichols protestors safe was myopic, he told me, a case of forgetting the big picture to quash the few dangers he could control.
Williams believes extremists will try to murder him after this story is published. And if they fail, he thinks he’ll “live to see the United States cease to exist.” He identifies with the violent abolitionist John Brown, who tried to start a slave revolt two years before the American Civil War and was executed. Williams thinks he himself may not be seen as such a radical soon, he told me. “I wonder if I’m maybe a little too early.”
I’d thought Williams was considering a return to a quiet life. Our two intense years together had been a strain sometimes even for me. But in the hotel room, he explained his plans for future operations against militias: “Until they kill me, this is what I’m doing.” He hopes to inspire others to follow in his footsteps and even start his own vigilante collective, running his own “agents” inside the far right.
In August, I published my investigation into AP3. (I used his records but did not otherwise rely on Williams as an anonymous source.) It was a way of starting to lay out what I’d learned since his first email: what’s driving the growth of militias, how they keep such a wide range of people united, the dangerous exploits that they’ve managed to keep out of public view.
Two months later, Williams published an anonymous essay. He revealed that he’d infiltrated the group as an “independent activist” and had sent me files. He wanted to test how the militia would respond to news of a mole.
The result was something he long had hoped for: a wave of paranoia inside AP3. “It’s a fucking risky thing we get involved in,” Seddon, the group’s founder, said in a private message. “Fucking trust nobody. There’s fucking turncoats everywhere.” (Seddon declined to comment for this story. He then sent a short follow-up email: “MAGA.”)
Sowing that distrust is why Williams is going on the record, albeit without his original name. He still plans to release thousands of files after this article is published — evidence tying sheriffs and police officers to the movement, his proudest coup, plus other records he hopes could become ammo for lawsuits. But Williams wants to let his former comrades know “a faggot is doing this to them.” He thinks his story could be his most effective weapon.
Every time militia members make a phone call, attend a meeting or go to a gun range together, he wants them “to be thinking, in the back of their heads, ‘This guy will betray me.’”
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have seen the "you really bought a tesla?" post a couple times now and it's another one of those things that I think people often have misconceptions about
1. the cheapest Tesla (model 3) was the world's bestselling electric car from 2018 to 2020, when it was ousted by the 2nd-cheapest Tesla (model Y). the model Y was the single best selling car in the world in the first quarter of 2023. they are very popular.
2. the cheapest Tesla is $40,240 new. with the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles, a price tag of $32,740 puts it on par with the Honda Odyssey minivan's base price or with slightly nicer trims of SUVs like the Subaru Outback or Toyota RAV4, and only about $100 more than a new Prius Prime. People in California may also qualify for an additional $2000-$5000 rebate for buying one, bringing the price down to $27,740 - just $1000 more than a new Toyota Camry.
3. the concerns about safety are often weighted against an incorrect baseline - so far, current data show that electric vehicles aren't more likely to catch fire in an accident than gas vehicles and are actually less likely to do so (but this is difficult to get solid data on. there's a bunch of articles reporting on a study by an insurance company showing a massive reduction in fire risk but the underlying data are highly suspicious).
4. the big point of distrust that I think is grounded: recalls. some of the 22 (22!) model 3 recalls are ~trivial, like "the driver's side sun visor may be missing the airbag warning sticker", but some are more serious, like "the airbags might not be correctly connected to the car." it seems like a lot of the issues have been addressed on the current (2023-2027) line, but the recurring problems with things ranging from minor software issues to pretty serious function issues are good cause for concern. None of the ones I've read about seem as severe as Toyota's "oops the accelerator gets stuck and your car can't stop moving forward" recall or Ford's "oops the engine explodes" recalls [plural], and even the worst ones are on par with things we've seen before especially from US automakers (glaring at Ford, GM, and Ford again). Ford and GM are both guilty of continuing to use known bad parts for >5 years with (in one case) thousands of fires and (in another) over a hundred deaths. moreover, GM's Bolt EV is under a 100% recall for the 2017-2022 model years for high fire risk and Ford recalled over 100,000 hybrids for fire risk - so is Tesla worse than GM or Ford? I don't know if I'd say that, but I'd really want a car I buy to live up to a higher standard.
in short, the most popular teslas by a huge margin are the two most affordable ones, which are fairly accessible to consumers (especially in California). the risk of a tesla exploding or catching on fire is not, as far as I can tell, higher than other cars (and it appears to be less likely per million miles traveled than some other EVs on the market). teslas still have a bunch of quality issues, and they still have some stupid design choices - but you can easily buy a shittier car for a lot more money, particularly an American-made one.
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Since first hitting the market in 1994, the Odyssey has been a popular minivan. And after the 2022 Odyssey won awards for “Best Minivan for Families” and “Best Minivan for the Money” from US News and World Report, the 2023 Honda Odyssey has a lot to live up to. It doesn’t disappoint! Keep reading to get to know this phenomenal vehicle.
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The Militia and the Mole
by Joshua Kaplan
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Reporting Highlights
A Freelance Vigilante: A wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell his family or friends.
The Future of Militias: He penetrated a new generation of militia leaders, which included doctors and government attorneys. Experts say that militias could have a renaissance under Donald Trump.
A Secret Trove: He sent ProPublica a massive trove of documents. The conversations that he secretly recorded give a unique, startling window into the militia movement.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
John Williams kept a backpack filled with everything he’d need to go on the run: three pairs of socks; a few hundred dollars cash; makeshift disguises and lock-picking gear; medical supplies, vitamins and high-calorie energy gels; and thumb drives that each held more than 100 gigabytes of encrypted documents, which he would quickly distribute if he were about to be arrested or killed.
On April 1, 2023, Williams retrieved the bag from his closet and rushed to his car. He had no time to clean the dishes that had accumulated in his apartment. He did not know if armed men were out looking for him. He did not know if he would ever feel safe to return. He parked his car for the night in the foothills overlooking Salt Lake City and curled up his 6-foot-4-inch frame in the back seat of the 20-year-old Honda. This was his new home.
He turned on a recording app to add an entry to his diary. His voice had the high-pitched rasp of a lifelong smoker: “Where to fucking start,” he sighed, taking a deep breath. After more than two years undercover, he’d been growing rash and impulsive. He had feared someone was in danger and tried to warn him, but it backfired. Williams was sure at least one person knew he was a double agent now, he said into his phone. “It’s only a matter of time before it gets back to the rest.”
In the daylight, Williams dropped an envelope with no return address in a U.S. Postal Service mailbox. He’d loaded it with a flash drive and a gold Oath Keepers medallion.
It was addressed to me.
The documents laid out a remarkable odyssey. Posing as an ideological compatriot, Williams had penetrated the top ranks of two of the most prominent right-wing militias in the country. He’d slept in the home of the man who claims to be the new head of the Oath Keepers, rifling through his files in the middle of the night. He’d devised elaborate ruses to gather evidence of militias’ ties to high-ranking law enforcement officials. He’d uncovered secret operations like the surveillance of a young journalist, then improvised ways to sabotage the militants’ schemes. In one group, his ploys were so successful that he became the militia’s top commander in the state of Utah.
Now he was a fugitive. He drove south toward a desert four hours from the city, where he could disappear.
1. Prelude
I’d first heard from Williams five months earlier, when he sent me an intriguing but mysterious anonymous email. “I have been attempting to contact national media and civil rights groups for over a year and been ignored,” it read. “I’m tired of yelling into the void.” He sent it to an array of reporters. I was the only one to respond. I’ve burned a lot of time sating my curiosity about emails like that. I expected my interest to die after a quick call. Instead, I came to occupy a dizzying position as the only person to know the secret Williams had been harboring for almost two years.
We spoke a handful of times over encrypted calls before he fled. He’d been galvanized by the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol, Williams told me, when militias like the Oath Keepers conspired to violently overturn the 2020 presidential election. He believed democracy was under siege from groups the FBI has said pose a major domestic terrorism threat. So he infiltrated the militia movement on spec, as a freelance vigilante. He did not tell the police or the FBI. A loner, he did not tell his family or friends.
Williams seemed consumed with how to ensure this wasn’t all a self-destructive, highly dangerous waste of time. He distrusted law enforcement and didn’t want to be an informant, he said. He told me he hoped to damage the movement by someday going public with what he’d learned.
The Capitol riot had been nagging at me too. I’d reported extensively on Jan. 6. I’d sat with families who blamed militias for snatching their loved ones away from them, pulling them into a life of secret meetings and violent plots — or into a jail cell. By the time Williams contacted me, though, the most infamous groups appeared to have largely gone dark. Were militias more enduring, more potent, than it seemed?
Some of what he told me seemed significant. Still, before the package arrived, it could feel like I was corresponding with a shadow. I knew Williams treated deception as an art form. “When you spin a lie,” he once told me, “you have to have things they can verify so they won’t think to ask questions.” While his stories generally seemed precise and sober — always reassuring for a journalist — I needed to proceed with extreme skepticism.
So I pored over his files, tens of thousands of them. They included dozens of hours of conversations he secretly recorded and years of private militia chat logs and videos. I was able to authenticate those through other sources, in and out of the movement. I also talked to dozens of people, from Williams’ friends to other members of his militias. I dug into his tumultuous past and discovered records online he hadn’t pointed me to that supported his account.
The files give a unique window, at once expansive and intimate, into one of the most consequential and volatile social movements of our time. Williams penetrated a new generation of paramilitary leaders, which included doctors, career cops and government attorneys. Sometimes they were frightening, sometimes bumbling, always heavily armed. It was a world where a man would propose assassinating politicians, only to spark a debate about logistics.
Federal prosecutors have convicted more than 1,000 people for their role in Jan. 6. Key militia captains were sent to prison for a decade or more. But that did not quash the allure that militias hold for a broad swath of Americans.
Now President-elect Donald Trump has promised to pardon Jan. 6 rioters when he returns to the White House. Experts warn that such a move could trigger a renaissance for militant extremists, sending them an unprecedented message of protection and support — and making it all the more urgent to understand them.
(Unless otherwise noted, none of the militia members mentioned in this story responded to requests for comment.)
Williams is part of a larger cold war, radical vs. radical, that’s stayed mostly in the shadows. A left-wing activist told me he personally knows about 30 people who’ve gone undercover in militias or white supremacist groups. They did not coordinate with law enforcement, instead taking the surveillance of one of the most intractable features of American politics into their own hands.
Skeptical of authorities, militias have sought to reshape the country through armed action. Williams sought to do it through betrayals and lies, which sat with him uneasily. “I couldn’t have been as successful at this if I wasn’t one of them in some respects,” he once told me. “I couldn’t have done it so long unless they recognized something in me.”
2. The Struggle
If there is one moment that set Williams on his path into the militia underground, it came roughly a decade before Jan. 6, when he was sent to a medium-security prison. He was in his early 30s, drawn to danger and filled with an inner turbulence.
Williams grew up in what he described to me, to friends and in court records as a dysfunctional and unhappy home. He was a gay child in rural America. His father viewed homosexuality as a mortal sin, he said. Williams spent much of his childhood outdoors, bird-watching, camping and trying to spend as little time as possible at home. (John Williams is now his legal name, one he recently acquired.)
Once he was old enough to move out, Williams continued to go off the grid for weeks at a time. Living in a cave interested him; the jobs he’d found at grocery stores and sandwich shops did not. He told me his young adulthood was “a blank space in my life,” a stretch of “petty crime” and falling-outs with old friends. He pled guilty to a series of misdemeanors: trespassing, criminal mischief, assault.
What landed Williams in prison was how he responded to one of those arrests. He sent disturbing, anonymous emails to investigators on the case, threatening their families. Police traced the messages back to him and put him away for three years.
Williams found time to read widely in prison — natural history books, Bertrand Russell, Cormac McCarthy. And it served as a finishing school for a skill that would be crucial in his undercover years. Surviving prison meant learning to maneuver around gang leaders and corrections officers. He learned how to steer conversations to his own benefit without the other person noticing.
When he got out, he had a clear ambition: to become a wilderness survival instructor. He used Facebook to advertise guided hikes in Utah’s Uinta Mountains. An old photo captures Williams looking like a lanky camp counselor as he shows students an edible plant. He sports a thick ponytail and cargo pants, painted toenails poking out from his hiking sandals.
Many people in Utah had turned to wilderness survival after a personal crisis, forming a community of misfits who thrived in environments harsh and remote. Even among them, Williams earned a reputation for putting himself in extreme situations. “Not many people are willing to struggle on their own. He takes that struggle to a high degree,” one friend told me admiringly. Williams took up krav maga and muay thai because he enjoyed fistfights. He once spent 40 days alone in the desert with only a knife, living off chipmunks and currants (by choice, to celebrate a birthday).
Williams struggled to get his survival business going. He’d hand out business cards at hobbyist gatherings with promises of adventure, but in practice, he was mostly leading seminars in city parks for beer money. He would only take calls in emergencies, another friend recalled, because he wanted to save money on minutes.
Then around New Year’s in 2019, according to Williams, he received an email from a leader in American Patriots Three Percent, or AP3. He wanted to hire Williams for a training session. He could pay $1,000.
Finally, Williams thought. I’m starting to get some traction.
3. The Decision
They had agreed there’d be no semiautomatic rifles, Williams told me, so everyone brought a sidearm. Some dozen militiamen had driven into the mountains near Peter Sinks, Utah, one of the coldest places in the contiguous U.S. Initially they wanted training in evasion and escape, Williams said, but he thought they needed to work up to that. So for three days, he taught them the basics of wilderness survival, but with a twist: how to stay alive while “trying to stay hidden.” He showed them how to build a shelter that would both keep them dry and escape detection. How to make a fire, then how to clean it up so no one could tell it was ever there.
As the days wore on, stray comments started to irk him. Once, a man said he’d been “kiked” into overpaying for his Ruger handgun. At the end of the training, AP3 leaders handed out matching patches. The ritual reminded Williams of a biker gang.
He’d already been to some shorter AP3 events to meet the men and tailor the lesson to his first meaningful client, Williams told me. But spending days in the woods with them felt different. He said he found the experience unpleasant and decided not to work with the group again.
This portion of Williams’ story — exactly how and why he first became a militia member — is the hardest to verify. By his own account, he kept his thoughts and plans entirely to himself. At the time, he was too embarrassed to even tell his friends what happened that weekend, he said. In the survival community, training militias was considered taboo.
I couldn’t help but wonder if Williams was hiding a less gallant backstory. Maybe he’d joined AP3 out of genuine enthusiasm and then soured on it. Maybe now he was trying to fool me. Indeed, when I called the AP3 leader who set up the training, he disputed Williams’ timeline. He remembered Williams staying sporadically but consistently involved after the session in the mountains, as a friend of the group who attended two or three events a year. To further muddy the picture, Williams had warned me the man would say something like that — Williams had worked hard to create the impression that he never left, he said, that he’d just gone inactive for a while, busy with work. (Remarkably, the AP3er defended Williams’ loyalty each time I asserted he’d secretly tried to undermine the group. “He was very well-respected,” he said. “I never questioned his honesty or his intentions.”)
Even Williams’ friends told me he was something of a mystery to them. But I found evidence that supports his story where so many loners bare their innermost thoughts: the internet. In 2019 and early 2020, Williams wrote thousands of since-deleted entries in online forums. These posts delivered a snapshot of his worldview in this period: idiosyncratic, erudite and angry with little room for moderation. “There are occasionally militia types that want these skills to further violent fringe agendas and I will absolutely not enable them,” he wrote in one 2020 entry about wilderness survival. In another, he called AP3 and its allies “far right lunatics.” The posts didn’t prove the details of his account, but here was the Williams I knew, writing under pseudonyms long before we’d met.
One day, he’d voice his disdain for Trump voters, neoliberalism or “the capitalist infrastructure.” Another, he’d rail against gun control measures as immoral. When Black Lives Matter protests broke out in 2020, Williams wrote that he was gathering medical supplies for local protestors. He sounded at times like a revolutionary crossed with a left-wing liberal arts student. “The sole job of a cop is to bully citizens on behalf of the state,” he wrote. “Violent overthrow of the state is our only viable option.”
Then came Jan. 6. As he was watching on TV, he later told me, Williams thought he recognized the patch on a rioter’s tactical vest. It looked like the one that AP3 leaders had handed out at the end of his training.
Did I teach that guy? he wondered. Why was I so cordial to them all?If they knew I was gay, I bet they’d want me dead, and I actually helped them. Because I was too selfish to think of anything but my career.
Shame quickly turned to anger, he told me, and to a desire for revenge. Pundits were saying that democracy itself was in mortal peril. Williams took that notion literally. He assumed countless Americans would respond with aggressive action, he said, and he wanted to be among them.
4. A New World
Williams stood alone in his apartment, watching himself in the mirror.
“I’m tall.”
“I’m Dave.”
“I’m tall.”
“I’m Dave.”
He tried to focus on his mannerisms, on the intonation of his voice. Whether he was saying the truth or a falsehood, he wanted to appear exactly the same.
Months had passed since the Capitol riot. By all appearances, Williams was now an enthusiastic member of AP3. Because he already had an in, joining the group was easy, he said. Becoming a self-fashioned spy took some trial and error, however. In the early days, he had posed as a homeless person to surveil militia training facilities, but he decided that was a waste of time.
The casual deceit that had served him in prison was proving useful. Deviousness was a skill, and he stayed up late working to hone it. He kept a journal with every lie he told so he wouldn’t lose track. His syllabus centered on acting exercises and the history of espionage and cults. People like sex cult leader Keith Raniere impressed him most — he studied biographies to learn how they manipulated people, how they used cruelty to wear their followers down into acquiescence.
Williams regularly berated the militia’s rank and file. He doled out condescending advice about the group’s security weaknesses, warning their technical incompetence would make them easy targets for left-wing hackers and government snoops. Orion Rollins, the militia’s top leader in Utah, soon messaged Williams to thank him for the guidance. “Don’t worry about being a dick,” he wrote. “It’s time to learn and become as untraceable as possible.” (The AP3 messages Williams sent me were so voluminous that I spent an entire month reading them before I noticed this exchange.)
Williams was entering the militia at a pivotal time. AP3 once had chapters in nearly every state, with a roster likely in the tens of thousands; as authorities cracked down on the movement after Jan. 6, membership was plummeting. Some who stayed on had white nationalist ties. Others were just lonely conservatives who had found purpose in the paramilitary cause. For now, the group’s leaders were focused on saving the militia, not taking up arms to fight their enemies. (Thanks to Williams’ trove and records from several other sources, I was eventually able to write an investigation into AP3’s resurgence.)
On March 4, 2021, Williams complained to Rollins that everyone was still ignoring his advice. Williams volunteered to take over as the state’s “intel officer,” responsible for protecting the group from outside scrutiny.
“My hands are tied,” Williams wrote. “If I’m not able to” take charge, the whole militia “might unravel.” Rollins gave him the promotion.
“Thanks Orion. You’ve shown good initiative here.” Privately, he saw a special advantage to his appointment. If anyone suspected there was a mole in Utah, Williams would be the natural choice to lead the mole hunt.
Now he had a leadership role. What he did not yet have was a plan. But how could he decide on goals, he figured, until he knew more about AP3? He would work to gather information and rise through the ranks by being the best militia member he could be.
He took note of the job titles of leaders he met, like an Air Force reserve master sergeant (I confirmed this through military records) who recruited other airmen into the movement. Williams attended paramilitary trainings, where the group practiced ambushes with improvised explosives and semiautomatic guns. He offered his comrades free lessons in hand-to-hand combat and bonded with them in the backcountry hunting jackrabbits. When the militia joined right-wing rallies for causes like gun rights, they went in tactical gear. Williams attended as their “gray man,” he said — assigned to blend in with the crowd and call in armed reinforcements if tensions erupted.
Since his work was seasonal, Williams could spend as much as 40 hours a week on militia activities. One of his duties as intel officer was to monitor the group’s enemies on the left, which could induce vertigo. A militia leader once dispatched him to a Democratic Socialists of America meeting at a local library, he said, where he saw a Proud Boy he recognized from a joint militia training. Was this a closet right-winger keeping tabs on the socialists? Or a closet leftist who might dox him or inform the police?
He first contacted me in October 2022. He couldn’t see how the movement was changing beyond his corner of Utah. AP3 was reinvigorated by then, I later found, with as many as 50 recruits applying each day. In private chats I reviewed, leaders were debating if they should commit acts of terrorism. At the Texas border, members were rounding up immigrants in armed patrols. But Williams didn’t know all that yet. On our first call, he launched into a litany of minutiae: names, logistical details, allegations of minor players committing petty crimes. He could tell I wasn’t sure what it all amounted to.
Williams feared that if anything he’d helped AP3, not damaged it. Then, in early November, Rollins told him to contact a retired detective named Bobby Kinch.
5. The Detective and the Sheriff
Williams turned on a recording device and dialed. Kinch picked up after one ring: “What’s going on?” he bellowed. “How you doing, man?”
“I don’t know if you remember me,” Kinch continued, but they’d met years before.
“Oh, oh, back in the day,” Williams said, stuttering for a second. He knew Kinch was expecting the call but was confused by the warm reception. Maybe Kinch was at the training in 2019?
“Well I’m the sitting, current national director of the Oath Keepers now.”
The militia’s eye-patched founder, Stewart Rhodes, was in jail amid his trial for conspiring to overthrow the government on Jan. 6. Kinch said he was serving on the group’s national board when his predecessor was arrested. Rhodes had called from jail to say, “Do not worry about me. This is God’s way.”
“He goes, ‘But I want you to save the organization.’”
Kinch explained that Rollins, who’d recently defected to the Oath Keepers, had been singing Williams’ praises. (Bound by shared ideology, militias are more porous than outsiders would think. Members often cycle between groups like square dance partners.) “I imagine your plate is full with all the crazy stuff going on in the world, but I’d love to sit down.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Williams said. “AP3 and Oath Keepers should definitely be working together.” He proposed forming a joint reconnaissance team so their two militias could collaborate on intelligence operations. Kinch lit up. “I’m a career cop,” he said. “I did a lot of covert stuff, surveillance.”
By the time they hung up 45 minutes later, Kinch had invited Williams to come stay at his home. Williams felt impressed with himself. The head of the most infamous militia in America was treating him like an old friend.
To me, Williams sounded like a different person on the call, with the same voice but a brand new personality. It was the first recording that I listened to and the first time I became certain the most important part of his story was true. To authenticate the record, I independently confirmed nonpublic details Kinch discussed on the tape, a process I repeated again and again with the other files. Soon I had proof of what would otherwise seem outlandish: Williams’ access was just as deep as he claimed.
I could see why people would be eager to follow Kinch. Even when he sermonized on the “global elitist cabal,” he spoke with the affable passion of a beloved high school teacher. I’d long been fascinated by the prevalence of cops on militia rosters, so I started examining his backstory.
Kinch grew up in upstate New York, the son of a World War II veteran who had him at about 50. When Kinch was young, he confided in a later recording, he was a “wheelman,” slang for getaway driver. “I ran from the cops so many fucking times,” he said. But “at the end of the day, you know, I got away. I never got caught.”
He moved to Las Vegas and, at the age of 25, became an officer in the metro police. Kinch came to serve in elite detective units over 23 years in the force, hunting fugitives and helping take down gangs like the Playboy Bloods. Eventually he was assigned to what he called the “Black squad,” according to court records, tasked with investigating violent crimes where the suspect was African American. (A Las Vegas police spokesperson told me they stopped “dividing squads by a suspect’s race” a year before Kinch retired.)
Then around Christmas in 2013, Kinch’s career began to self-destruct. In a series of Facebook posts, he said that he would welcome a “race war.” “Bring it!” he wrote. “I’m about as fed up as a man (American, Christian, White, Heterosexual) can get!” An ensuing investigation prompted the department to tell the Secret Service that Kinch “could be a threat to the president,” according to the Las Vegas Sun. (The Secret Service interviewed him and determined he was not a threat to President Barack Obama, the outlet reported. Kinch told the paper he was not racist and that he was being targeted by colleagues with “an ax to grind.”) In 2016, he turned in his badge, a year after the saga broke in the local press.
Kinch moved to southern Utah and found a job hawking hunting gear at a Sportsman’s Warehouse. But he “had this urge,” he later said on a right-wing podcast. “Like I wasn’t done yet.” So he joined the Oath Keepers. “When people tell me that violence doesn’t solve anything, I look back over my police career,” he once advised his followers. “And I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, because violence did solve quite a bit.’”
Kinch added Williams to an encrypted Signal channel where the Utah Oath Keepers coordinated their intel work. Two weeks later on Nov. 30, 2022, Williams received a cryptic message from David Coates, one of Kinch’s top deputies.
Coates was an elder statesman of sorts in the Oath Keepers, a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran with a Hulk Hogan mustache. There’d been a break-in at the Utah attorney general’s office, he reported to the group, and for some unspoken reason, the Oath Keepers seemed to think this was of direct relevance to them. Coates promised to find out more about the burglary: “The Sheriff should have some answers” to “my inquiries today or tomorrow.”
That last line would come to obsess Williams. He sent a long, made-up note about his own experiences collaborating with law enforcement officials. “I’m curious, how responsive is the Sheriff to your inquiries? Or do you have a source you work with?”
“The Sheriff has become a personal friend who hosted my FBI interview,” Coates responded. “He opens a lot of doors.” Coates had been in D.C. on Jan. 6, he’d told Williams. It’d make sense if that had piqued the FBI’s interest.
To Williams, it hinted at a more menacing scenario — at secret ties between those who threaten the rule of the law and those duty-bound to enforce it. He desperately wanted more details, more context, the sheriff’s name. But he didn’t want to push for too much too fast.
6. The Hunting of Man
A forest engulfed Kinch’s house on all sides. He lived in a half-million-dollar cabin in summer home country, up 8,000 feet in the mountains outside Zion National Park. Williams stood in the kitchen on a mid-December Saturday morning.
Williams had recently made a secret purchase of a small black device off Amazon. It looked like a USB drive. The on-off switch and microphone holes revealed what it really was: a bug. As the two men chatted over cups of cannoli-flavored coffee, Williams didn’t notice when Kinch’s dog snatched the bug from his bag.
The night before, Williams had slept in the guest room. The house was cluttered with semiautomatic rifles. He had risked photographing three plaques on the walls inscribed with the same Ernest Hemingway line. “There is no hunting like the hunting of man,” they read. “Those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else.”
They spotted the dog at the same time. The bug was attached to a charging device. The animal was running around with it like it was a tennis ball. As Kinch went to retrieve it, Williams felt panic grip his chest. Could anyone talk their way out of this? He’d learned enough about Kinch to be terrified of his rage. Looking around, Williams eyed his host’s handgun on the kitchen counter.
If he even starts to examine it, I’ll grab the gun, he thought. Then I’ll shoot him and flee into the woods.
Kinch took the bug from the dog’s mouth. Then he handed it right to Williams and started to apologize.
Don’t worry about it, Williams said. He’s a puppy!
On their way out the door, Kinch grabbed the pistol and placed it in the console of his truck. It was an hour’s drive to the nearest city, where the Oath Keepers were holding a leadership meeting. Williams rode shotgun, his bug hooked onto the zipper of his backpack. On the tape, I could hear the wind racing through the car window. The radio played Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69.”
Kinch seemed in the hold of a dark nostalgia — as if he was wrestling with the monotony of civilian life, with the new strictures he faced since turning in his badge. Twenty minutes in, he recited the Hemingway line like it was a mantra. “I have a harder time killing animals than a human being,” Kinch continued. Then he grew quiet as he recounted the night he decided to retire.
He’d woken up in an oleander bush with no memory of how he’d gotten there. His hands were covered in blood. He was holding a gun. “I had to literally take my magazine out and count my bullets, make sure I didn’t fucking kill somebody,” he said. “I black out when I get angry. And I don’t remember what the fuck I did.”
Kinch went on: “I love the adrenaline of police work,” and then he paused. “I miss it. It was a hoot.”
By the time they reached Cedar City, Utah, Kinch was back to charismatic form. He dished out compliments to the dozen or so Oath Keepers assembled for the meeting — “You look like you lost weight” — and told everyone to put their phones in their cars. “It’s just good practice. Because at some point we may have to go down a route,” one of his deputies explained, trailing off.
Kinch introduced Williams to the group. “He’s not the feds. And if he is, he’s doing a damn good job.”
Williams laughed, a little too loud.
7. Doctor, Lawyer, Sergeant, Spy
Early in the meeting, Kinch laid out his vision for the Oath Keepers’ role in American life. “We have a two-edged sword,” he said. The “dull edge” was more traditional grassroots work, exemplified by efforts to combat alleged election fraud. He hoped to build their political apparatus so that in five or 10 years, conservative candidates would be seeking the Oath Keepers’ endorsement.
Then there was the sharp edge: paramilitary training. “You hone all these skills because when the dull edge fails, you’ve got to be able to turn that around and be sharp.” The room smelled like donuts, one of the men had remarked.
The week before, Kinch’s predecessor had been convicted of seditious conspiracy. This was their first meeting since the verdict, and I opened the recordings later with the same anticipation I feel sitting down for the Super Bowl. What would come next for the militia after this historic trial: ruin, recovery or revolt?
The stature of men leading the group’s post-Jan. 6 resurrection startled me. I was expecting the ex-cops, like the one from Fresno, California, who said he stayed on with the militia because “this defines me.” Militias tend to prize law enforcement ties; during an armed operation, it could be useful to have police see you as a friend.
But there was also an Ohio OB-GYN on the national board of directors — he used to work for the Cleveland Clinic, I discovered, and now led a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group. The doctor was joined at board meetings by a city prosecutor in Utah, an ex-city council member and, Williams was later told, a sergeant with an Illinois sheriff’s department. (The doctor did not respond to requests for comment. He has since left his post with the UnitedHealth subsidiary, a spokesperson for the company said.)
Over six hours, the men set goals and delegated responsibilities with surprisingly little worry about the federal crackdown on militias. They discussed the scourges they were there to combat (stolen elections, drag shows, President Joe Biden) only in asides. Instead, they focused on “marketing” — “So what buzzwords can we insert in our mission statement?” one asked — and on resources that’d help local chapters rapidly expand. “I’d like to see this organization be like the McDonald’s of patriot organizations,” another added. To Williams, it felt more like a Verizon sales meeting than an insurrectionist cell.
Kinch had only recently taken over and as I listened, I wondered how many followers he really had outside of that room. They hadn’t had a recruitment drive in the past year, which they resolved to change. They had $1,700 in the bank. But it didn’t seem entirely bravado. Kinch and his comrades mentioned conversations with chapters around the county.
Then as they turned from their weakened national presence to their recent successes in Utah, Williams snapped to attention.
“We had surveillance operations,” Kinch said, without elaboration.
“We’re making progress locally on the law enforcement,” Coates added. He said that at least three of them can get “the sheriff” on the phone any time of day. Like the last time, Coates didn’t give a name, but he said something even more intriguing: “The sheriff is my tie-in to the state attorney general because he’s friends.” Williams told me he fought the urge to lob a question. (The attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)
Closing out the day, Kinch summarized their plan moving forward: Keep a low profile. Focus on the unglamorous work. Rebuild their national footprint. And patiently prepare for 2024. “We still got what, two more years, till another quote unquote election?” He thanked Williams for coming and asked if they could start planning training exercises.
“Absolutely, yeah, I’m excited about that.” Williams was resolved to find his way onto the national board.
8. The Stakeout
On Dec. 17, 2022, a week after the meeting, Williams called a tech-savvy 19-year-old Oath Keeper named Rowan. He’d told Rowan he was going to teach him to infiltrate leftist groups, but Williams’ real goal was far more underhanded. While the older Oath Keepers had demurred at his most sensitive questions recently, the teenager seemed eager to impress a grizzled survival instructor. By assigning missions to Rowan, he hoped to probe the militias’ secrets without casting suspicion on himself.
“You don’t quite have the life experience to do this,” Williams opened on the recording. But with a couple years’ training, “I think we can work towards that goal.” He assigned his student a scholarly monograph, “Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society,” to begin his long education in how leftists think. “Perfect,” Rowan responded. He paused to write the title down.
Then came his pupil’s first exercise: build a dossier on Williams’ boss in AP3. Williams explained it was safest to practice on people they knew.
In Rowan, Williams had found a particularly vulnerable target. He was on probation at the time. According to court records, earlier that year, Rowan had walked up to a stranger’s truck as she was leaving her driveway. She rolled down her window. He punched her several times in the face. When police arrived, Rowan began screaming that he was going to kill them and threatened to “blow up the police department.” He was convicted of misdemeanor assault.
Williams felt guilty about using the young man but also excited. (“He is completely in my palm,” he recorded in his diary.) Within a few weeks, he had Rowan digging into Kinch’s background. “I’m going to gradually have him do more and more things,” he said in the diary, “with the hopes that I can eventually get him to hack” into militia leaders’ accounts.
The relationship quickly unearthed something that disturbed him. The week of their call, Williams woke up to a series of angry messages in the Oath Keepers’ encrypted Signal channel. The ire was directed toward a Salt Lake Tribune reporter who, according to Coates, was “a real piece of shit.” His sins included critical coverage of “anyone trying to expose voter fraud” and writing about a local political figure who’d appeared on a leaked Oath Keepers roster.
Williams messaged Rowan. “I noticed in the chat that there is some kind of red list of journalists etc? Could you get that to me?” he asked. “It would be very helpful to my safety when observing political rallies or infiltrating leftists.”
“Ah yes, i have doxes on many journalists in utah,” Rowan responded, using slang for sharing someone’s personal data with malicious intent.
He sent over a dossier on the Tribune reporter, which opened with a brief manifesto: “This dox goes out to those that have been terrorized, doxed, harassed, slandered, and family names mutilated by these people.” It provided the reporter’s address and phone number, along with two pictures of his house.
Then Rowan shared similar documents about a local film critic — he’d posted a “snarky” retweet of the Tribune writer — and about a student reporter at Southern Utah University. The college student had covered a rally the Oath Keepers recently attended, Rowan explained, and the militia believed he was coordinating with the Tribune. “We found the car he drove through a few other members that did a stakeout.”
“That’s awesome,” Williams said. Internally, he was reeling: a stakeout? In the dossier, he found a backgrounder on the student’s parents along with their address. Had armed men followed this kid around? Did they surveil his family home?
His notes show him wrestling with a decision he hadn’t let himself reckon with before: Was it time to stop being a fly on the wall and start taking action? Did he need to warn someone? The journalists? The police? Breaking character would open the door to disaster. The incident with Kinch’s dog had been a chilling reminder of the risks.
Williams had been in the militia too long. He was losing his sense of objectivity. The messages were alarming, but were they an imminent threat? He couldn’t tell. Williams had made plans to leave Utah if his cover was blown. He didn’t want to jeopardize two years of effort over a false alarm. But what if he did nothing and this kid got hurt?
9. The Plan
By 2023, Williams’ responsibilities were expanding as rapidly as his anxiety. His schedule was packed with events for AP3, the Oath Keepers and a third militia he’d recently gotten inside. He vowed to infiltrate the Proud Boys and got Coates to vouch for him with the local chapter. He prepared plans to penetrate a notorious white supremacist group too.
His adversaries were gaining momentum as well. Williams soon made the four-hour drive to Kinch’s house for another leadership meeting and was told on tape about a national Oath Keepers recruiting bump; they’d also found contact information for 40,000 former members, which they hoped to use to bring a flood of militiamen back into the fold.
Despite the risk to his own safety and progress, Williams decided to send the journalists anonymous warnings from burner accounts. He attached sensitive screenshots so that they’d take him seriously. And then … nothing. The reporters never responded; he wondered if the messages went to spam. His secret was still secure.
But the point of his mission was finally coming into focus. He was done simply playing the part of model militia member. His plan had two parts: After gathering as much compromising information as he could, he would someday release it all online, he told me. He carefully documented anything that looked legally questionable, hoping law enforcement would find something useful for a criminal case. At the very least, going public could make militiamen more suspicious of each other.
In the meantime, he would undermine the movement from the inside. He began trying to blunt the danger that he saw lurking in every volatile situation the militiamen put themselves in.
On Jan. 27, 2023, body camera footage from the police killing of Tyre Nichols, an unarmed Black man, became public. “The footage is gruesome and distressing,” The New York Times reported. “Cities across the U.S. are bracing for protests.” The militias had often responded to Black Lives Matter rallies with street brawls and armed patrols.
Williams had visions of Kyle Rittenhouse-esque shootings in the streets. He put his newly formulated strategy into action, sending messages to militiamen around the country with made-up rumors he hoped would persuade them to stay home.
In Utah, he wrote to Kinch and the leaders of his other two militias. He would be undercover at the protests in Salt Lake City, he wrote. If any militiamen went, even “a brief look of recognition could blow my cover and put my life in danger.” All three ordered their troops to avoid the event. (“This is a bit of a bummer,” one AP3 member responded. “I’ve got some aggression built up I need to let out.”)
After the protests, Williams turned on his voice diary and let out a long sigh. For weeks, he’d been nauseous and had trouble eating. He’d developed insomnia that would keep him up until dawn. He’d gone to the rally to watch for militia activity. When he got home, he’d vomited blood.
Even grocery shopping took hours now. He circled the aisles to check if he was being tailed. Once while driving, he thought he caught someone following him. He’d reached out to a therapist to help “relieve some of this pressure,” he said, but was afraid to speak candidly with him. “I can check his office for bugs and get his electronics out of the office. And then once we’re free, I can tell him what’s going on.”
He quickly launched into a litany of items on his to-do list. A training exercise to attend. A recording device he needed to find a way to install. “I’m just fucking sick of being around these toxic motherfuckers.”
“It’s getting to be too much for me.”
10. The Deep State
On March 20, Williams called Scot Seddon, the founder of AP3. If he was on the verge of a breakdown, it didn’t impact his performance. I could tell when Williams was trying to advance his agenda as I listened later, but he was subtle about it. Obsequious. Methodical. By day’s end, he’d achieved perhaps his most remarkable feat yet. He’d helped persuade Seddon and his lieutenants to fire the head of AP3’s Utah chapter and to install Williams in his place.
Now he had access to sensitive records only senior militia leaders could see. He had final say over the group’s actions in an entire state. He knew the coup would make him vastly more effective. Yet that night in his voice diary, Williams sounded like a man in despair.
The success only added to his paranoia. Becoming a major figure in the Utah militia scene raised a possibility he couldn’t countenance: He might be arrested and sent to jail for some action of his comrades.
With a sense of urgency now, he focused even more intently on militia ties to government authorities. “I have been still collecting evidence on the paramilitaries’ use of law enforcement,” he said in the diary entry. “It’s way deeper than I thought.”
He solved the mystery of the Oath Keepers’ “sheriff”: It was the sheriff for Iron County, Utah, a tourist hub near two national parks. He assigned Rowan to dig deeper into the official’s ties with the movement and come back with emails or text messages. (In a recent interview, the sheriff told me that he declined an offer to join the Oath Keepers but that he’s known “quite a few” members and thinks “they’re generally good people.” Coates has periodically contacted him about issues like firearms rules that Coates believes are unconstitutional, the sheriff said. “If I agree, I contact the attorney general’s office.”)
Claiming to work on “a communication strategy for reaching out to law enforcement,” Williams then goaded AP3 members into bragging about their police connections. They told him about their ties with high-ranking officers in Missouri and in Louisiana, in Texas and in Tennessee.
The revelations terrified him. “When this gets out, I think I’m probably going to flee overseas,” he said in his diary. “They have too many connections.” What if a cop ally helped militants track him down? “I don’t think I can safely stay within the United States.”
Four days later, he tuned into a Zoom seminar put on by a fellow AP3 leader. It was a rambling and sparsely attended meeting. But 45 minutes in, a woman brought up an issue in her Virginia hometown, population 23,000.
The town’s vice mayor, a proud election denier, was under fire for a homophobic remark. She believed a local reporter covering the controversy was leading a secret far-left plot. What’s more, the reporter happened to be her neighbor. To intimidate her, she said, he’d been leaving dead animals on her lawn.
“I think I have to settle a score with this guy,” she concluded. “They’re getting down to deep state local level and it’s got to be stopped.” After the call, Williams went to turn off his recording device. “Well, that was fucking insane,” he said aloud.
He soon reached out to the woman to offer his advice. Maybe he could talk her down, Williams thought, or at least determine what she meant by settling a score. But she wasn’t interested in speaking with him. So again he faced a choice: do nothing or risk his cover being blown. He finally came to the same conclusion he had the last time he’d feared journalists were in jeopardy. On March 31, he sent an anonymous warning.
“Because she is a member of a right wing militia group and is heavily armed, I wanted to let you know,” Williams wrote to the reporter. “I believe her to be severely mentally ill and I believe her to be dangerous. For my own safety, I cannot reveal more.”
He saw the article the next morning. The journalist had published 500 words about the disturbing email he’d gotten, complete with a screenshot of Williams’ entire note. Only a few people had joined that meandering call. Surely only Williams pestered the woman about it afterwards. There could be little doubt that he was the mole.
He pulled the go bag from his closet and fled. A few days later, while on the run, Williams recorded the final entries in his diary. Amid the upheaval, he sounded surprised to feel a sense of relief: “I see the light at the end of the tunnel for the first time in two and a half years.”
Coda: Project 2025
It was seven days before the 2024 presidential election. Williams had insisted I not bring my phone, on the off chance my movements were being tracked. We were finally meeting for the first time, in a city that he asked me not to disclose. He entered the cramped hotel room wearing a camo hat, hiking shoes and a “Spy vs. Spy” comic strip T-shirt. “Did you pick the shirt to match the occasion?” I asked. He laughed. “Sometimes I can’t help myself.”
We talked for days, with Williams splayed across a Best Western office chair beside the queen bed. He evoked an aging computer programmer with 100 pounds of muscle attached, and he seemed calmer than on the phone, endearingly offbeat. The vision he laid out — of his own future and of the country’s — was severe.
After he dropped everything and went underground, Williams spent a few weeks in the desert. He threw his phone in a river, flushed documents down the toilet and switched apartments when he returned to civilization. At first, he spent every night by the door ready for an attack; if anyone found him and ambushed him, it’d happen after dark, he figured. No one ever came, and he began to question if he’d needed to flee at all. The insomnia of his undercover years finally abated. He began to sketch out the rest of his life.
Initially, he hoped to connect with lawmakers in Washington, helping them craft legislation to combat the militia movement. By last summer, those ambitions had waned. Over time, he began to wrestle with his gift for deceiving people who trusted him. “I don’t necessarily like what it says about me that I have a talent for this,” he said.
To me, it seemed that the ordeal might be starting to change him. He’d become less precise in consistently adhering to the facts in recent weeks, I thought, more grandiose in his account of his own saga. But then for long stretches, he’d speak with the same introspection and attention to detail that he showed on our first calls. His obsession with keeping the Tyre Nichols protestors safe was myopic, he told me, a case of forgetting the big picture to quash the few dangers he could control.
Williams believes extremists will try to murder him after this story is published. And if they fail, he thinks he’ll “live to see the United States cease to exist.” He identifies with the violent abolitionist John Brown, who tried to start a slave revolt two years before the American Civil War and was executed. Williams thinks he himself may not be seen as such a radical soon, he told me. “I wonder if I’m maybe a little too early.”
I’d thought Williams was considering a return to a quiet life. Our two intense years together had been a strain sometimes even for me. But in the hotel room, he explained his plans for future operations against militias: “Until they kill me, this is what I’m doing.” He hopes to inspire others to follow in his footsteps and even start his own vigilante collective, running his own “agents” inside the far right.
In August, I published my investigation into AP3. (I used his records but did not otherwise rely on Williams as an anonymous source.) It was a way of starting to lay out what I’d learned since his first email: what’s driving the growth of militias, how they keep such a wide range of people united, the dangerous exploits that they’ve managed to keep out of public view.
Two months later, Williams published an anonymous essay. He revealed that he’d infiltrated the group as an “independent activist” and had sent me files. He wanted to test how the militia would respond to news of a mole.
The result was something he long had hoped for: a wave of paranoia inside AP3. “It’s a fucking risky thing we get involved in,” Seddon, the group’s founder, said in a private message. “Fucking trust nobody. There’s fucking turncoats everywhere.” (Seddon declined to comment for this story. He then sent a short follow-up email: “MAGA.”)
Sowing that distrust is why Williams is going on the record, albeit without his original name. He still plans to release thousands of files after this article is published — evidence tying sheriffs and police officers to the movement, his proudest coup, plus other records he hopes could become ammo for lawsuits. But Williams wants to let his former comrades know “a faggot is doing this to them.” He thinks his story could be his most effective weapon.
Every time militia members make a phone call, attend a meeting or go to a gun range together, he wants them “to be thinking, in the back of their heads, ‘This guy will betray me.’”
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Lonsdor K518 Update:Added More Honda Auto Immobilizer Car Models
Lonsdor K518 Pro/K518 series key programmer released a new auto immobilizer upgrade for Honda on June 24th, 2024. Please update your device to check the details.
Support Models:
Accord\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 Accord\-2018\Smart key\Button type 3 Accord\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 Accord\2023-\Smart key\Button start(old key)AVANCIER\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 AVANCIER\-2018\Smart key\Button type 3 AVANCIER\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 BREEZE\2023\Smart key\Button start Ciimo\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 Ciimo\-2018\Smart key\Button type 3 Ciimo\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 City\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 City\-2018\Smart key\Button type 3 City\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 City\2019-\Smart key\Button start Civic\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 Civic\-2018\Smart key\Button type 3 Civic\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 Crider\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 Crider\-2018\Smart key\Button type 3 Crider\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 Crosstour\Smart key\Button type 2 CR-V\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 CR-V\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 CR-V\2023\Smart key\Button start Elysion\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 Elysion\-2018\Smart key\Button type 3 Elysion\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 Elysion\2019-2021\Smart key\Button start Envix\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 Envix\-2018\Smart key\Button type 3 Envix\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 Everus\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 Everus\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 Fit\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 Fit\-2018\Smart key\Button type 3 Fit\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 Gienia\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 Gienia\-2018\Smart key\Button type 3 Gienia\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 Greiz\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 Greiz\-2018\Smart key\Button type 3 Greiz\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 HR-V\2023-\Smart key\Button start Inspire\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 Inspire\-2018\Smart key\Button type 3 Inspire\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 Inspire\2019-2022\Smart key\Button start Jade\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 Jade\-2018\Smart key\Button type 3 Jade\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 Life\2021-\Smart key\Button start Odyssey\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 Odyssey\-2018\Smart key\Button type 3 Odyssey\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 Odyssey\2019-2021\Smart key\Button start Spirior\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 Spirior\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 UR-V\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 UR-V\-2018\Smart key\Button type 3 UR-V\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 Vezel\-2018\Smart key\Button type 2 Vezel\-2018\Smart key\Button type 3 Vezel\-2018\Smart key\Knob type 1 Vezel\2022\Smart key\Button start(4A chip) XR-V\2019-2021\Smart key\Button start XR-V\2023\Smart key\Button start
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Kam's 2000 Honda Civic - The "Un-shitbox" Era
From the time I was knee-high to a grasshopper, my fascination with cars was already in full gear. Picture a fourth-grader, wide-eyed and excited, collecting Hot Wheels like they were precious gems. But, my true automotive odyssey began when the school bell rang, and I would race to my friend's house to play Gran Turismo 4 and Midnight Club: Los Angeles on the PlayStation 2.
As the pixels danced on the screen, I found myself captivated by watching the race replays and attempting to capture the "perfect" photo – the kind that you’d find in the glossy pages of car magazines. And so, my journey into the realm of automotive photography ignited.
Around that time, my older brothers were like modern-day mechanics, forever bringing home various models of Toyotas: an '80s MR2, a trio of Z20 Soarers, and a rare Toyota Aerocabin; our driveway resembled a makeshift garage. My adventure into car ownership was marked by an AE92 Corolla, but my teenage stubbornness veered me toward a 2006 Ford Focus hatch, courtesy of an aversion to the Corolla's short shifter gearbox. Hindsight whispers that I should've stuck with the Corolla, yet the die was cast, and the Ford Focus introduced me to the world of compact cars, eventually paving the way for my 2000 Honda Civic.
I got the Civic in November 2021 during a tough time in my life. It was bone-stock, except for a few upgrades from the previous owner, like an Integra DC5 steering wheel and a set of GSR Blades. At first, I had big plans. I wanted to wrap it in baby blue, get smoked headlights and taillights, a Type R Wing, and Enkei RPF1s. The definition of being a really immature car enthusiast, more interested in making it look cool rather than making it drive better; then again. what else would you expect from a 21-year-old with limited mechanical knowledge.
My interest in the EK Civic came from a family friend named Simon, aka Joydrive. He made a video series documenting his Racewars build, and later buying the now infamous, yellow "ClichEK." I liked the way these cars were designed and having driven a Ford Focus for most of my time on the road, it made sense to get something similar in size.
My Civic remained untouched for a while, other than the addition of EK9 cup holders, a concession to my partner's beverage-holding fatigue during gear changes. This was a subtle upgrade but one that would prove hugely appreciated in the future. Life was good. I had my dream car which was in good condition for its age and reasonably priced (something that is hard to find in the post-covid car market), then came the transformative phase. I bought a new front bumper, front lip, and Type R grille, as well as "angel eye" headlights, and rear lip, which is still in my garage waiting to be put on as I write this.
The plot thickened on a fateful commute home from work when I had a run-in with a BMW X5 on the highway. The envisioned “RICE” build took a backseat as smashed headlights and a misaligned engine bay/ bonnet demanded attention. Salvaging replacement parts from the wreckers, I resurrected my Civic, mechanically intact but aesthetically bruised. It was demotivating to spend time and money making it look a certain way, only to have it go back to how it was before. Time passed and it simply existed as just another car, until Simon made a video revealing the upgrades he made to his build.
Fast forward to today, other than hitting a tow ball at the end of 2023, the car remains the same since I fixed it after the accident. I found my dream wheels on Facebook Marketplace, which was a feel-good moment, and after speaking to a couple of people, the road ahead is clear. Cut and polish, installation of the front and rear lip, coilovers so I can put the RPF1s on, and install the replacement number plates which are on its way. The trajectory now leans towards a clean, OEM plus build; a different path from what I first envisioned. For those who are interested in infrequent Civic updates, I often post progress photos on my car Instagram (@EK1WA), until next time; welcome to the “Un-shitbox” chapter.
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オデッセイ 復活
2023年12月15日 ホンダのミニバン「オデッセイ」が2023年に復活しました。 2022年に販売終了となったモデルが、日本で再び発売されることとなりました。 新型「オデッセイ」は、質感や機能を磨いた上級ミニバンとして位置付けられており、2023年12月8日に販売が開始されました。 これにより、約2年ぶりに「オデッセイ」が復活することとなります。新型の「オデッセイ」は、高級感が増し、先行予約の段階で注目を集めています。 なお、復活に伴い、国内での生産から中国での生産に切り替わることとなりました。 これにより、日本市場での需要に対応する体制が整えられることになります。【1】【2】【3】 December 15, 2023 Honda's minivan "Odyssey" will be revived in 2023. The model that was discontinued in 2022 will be released again in Japan. The new Odyssey is positioned as a high-end minivan with improved quality and functionality, and sales began on December 8, 2023. As a result, "Odyssey" will be revived for the first time in about two years. The new Odyssey has an increased sense of luxury and is attracting attention during the pre-order stage. In addition, due to the revival, production will be switched from domestic production to China. This will create a system that can respond to demand in the Japanese market. [1] [2] [3] Citations: [1] https://kuruma-news.jp/post/687229 [2] https://www.webcg.net/articles/-/49342 [3] https://news.mynavi.jp/article/20231208-odyssey/ [4] https://youtube.com/watch?v=HoDs3W_eroY [5] https://www.carsensor.net/contents/editor/category_849/_67270.html
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Litens Announces 28 New SKUs
Dublin, Ohio – October 24, 2023 – Litens Aftermarket, offering the most complete portfolio of aftermarket belt drive products, introduces its latest product lineup, featuring 28 new SKUs comprised of 15 pulleys covering 4,400,000 vehicles in operation (VIO), and 13 belt tensioners covering 3,100,000 VIO. This expansion offers enhanced coverage for over 7,600,000 additional VIO, including coverage for more than 1,000,000 VIO for 2016-2021 Honda models and innovative solutions for popular Ford F-150 applications. The newly introduced belt tensioners include coverage for the 2016-2021 Honda models, such as the Piolet, Odyssey, Ridgeline and Passport. Litens is responding to the demands of millions of customers, enabling technicians to access the right tensioners for proper belt drive system maintenance. These portfolio additions are timely as these vehicles approach the point of needing a system reset, ensuring optimal belt drive system performance. A system reset involves replacing all components of the belt drive system, including the tensioner, idler pulley(s), and the belt, simultaneously, to maintain proper belt drive system performance throughout the vehicle's lifespan. The Litens portfolio expansion also includes extensive coverage for the most popular vehicle on U.S. roads, the Ford F-150, featuring late model coverage for pulleys and tensioners for over 1 million VIO. The new tensioners have undergone design enhancements to the OE products, including a lift feature and Litens Technician Assist Pin (TAP). The lift feature adds an extra inch of accessibility for technicians, providing greater ease of access. The Litens TAP eliminates the need for a second set of hands during installation, securely positioning the tensioner for independent and safe belt manipulation. These innovations streamline the replacement process, improving safety and efficiency. Litens is also introducing a cost-effective and time-saving solution in the form of its new pulley kit, catering to multiple 2015-2022 Volvo applications covering nearly 500,000 VIO. This innovative kit includes all three pulleys in one package, eliminating the need for OE bracket replacement. Vehicle owners now have an affordable option to replace only the components that experience the most wear - the three pulleys - saving technicians the labor-intensive process of removing and reinstalling a bracket with a functioning life cycle. Commenting on the expansion, Randy Wolters, aftermarket product manager, stated, "Litens is committed to delivering an innovative, engineering-first approach to the aftermarket. Our latest product lineup demonstrates our dedication to providing the most comprehensive range of high-quality OE-manufactured tensioners, designed to enhance the experience and efficiency for technicians." For more information, visit https://www.litensaftermarket.com/. #litens #rpmmag #rpmmagazine Read the full article
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2025 Honda Type R New Colors
Have you heard the latest news from Honda? They are planning to achieve Level 4 autonomy by 2025! This is a huge step for the automotive industry and a testament to Honda’s commitment to innovation and advancement. Autonomy at Level 4 For those who may not be familiar, Level 4 autonomy means that a vehicle is capable of driving itself without the need for any human intervention. While certain…
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#2022 Honda Odyssey#2023 Honda Cr V Ex-L#2023 Honda Crv All Weather Mats#2023 Honda Crv Fog Lights#2023 Honda Crv Owner Manual#2023 Honda Crv Towing Capacity#2025#2025 Honda Cr V For Sale#colors#honda#Honda Crv 2023 Japon#new#type
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Vans offer unique advantages over other vehicles when you need serious hauling power, passenger space, or commercial capabilities. With so many options on the market, it can be tricky choosing the ideal van for your needs. This comprehensive guide covers the leading minivans and full-size vans for 2023. We'll overview the top-rated models in both categories and discuss key features and strengths of the best vans. Whether you need family-friendly transportation or a versatile work vehicle, these recommendations help you find your perfect match. Let's dive in and review the cream of the crop when it comes to vans. The Best Minivans for 2023 Minivans bridge the gap between spacious family vehicles and car-like maneuverability. Here are four standout choices for 2023: Chrysler Pacifica Chrysler Pacifica The Pacifica reigns as the most luxurious minivan you can buy. With seating for up to eight, you'll ride in comfort and style. Signature features include: High-end cabin materials and attention to detail User-friendly infotainment and connectivity Segment-exclusive Stow 'n Go folding second row seats Hybrid option with 33 mpg combined fuel economy The Pacifica remains unmatched for those wanting a premium family hauler. Honda Odyssey Honda Odyssey The Odyssey delivers exceptional comfort, convenience, and safety. This perennial top seller provides family-friendly flexibility. Key strengths: Spacious eight-seat cabin layout Handy storage solutions throughout Kid-focused rear entertainment system Advanced driver aids and excellent crash test results For those needing serious interior versatility, the Odyssey can't be beat. Toyota Sienna Toyota Sienna Now exclusively a hybrid, the Sienna offers outstanding fuel efficiency without sacrificing roominess. This tech-savvy people mover keeps the whole family happy. Notable attributes: 36 mpg combined fuel economy Available all-wheel drive Standard seven-seat configuration User-friendly infotainment and connectivity Extensive active safety features The Sienna pairs hybrid efficiency with Toyota's renowned quality and durability. Kia Carnival Kia Carnival The Carnival brings unexpected style and luxury to the minivan segment. This new-for-2022 model combines innovation with value. Key highlights: Striking SUV-inspired design Palatial passenger room High-end details and materials throughout Abundant tech and infotainment features Smooth handling and ride quality The Carnival is a home run for families wanting a modern, refined minivan. This quartet represents the cream of the crop for today's minivan offerings. Now let's discuss the must-have features and benefits of top minivans. Key Features of the Best Minivans The leading minivans for 2023 deliver an ideal blend of practicality, comfort, and innovation. Here are some of their most important attributes: Passenger and Cargo Room With seating for seven or eight, minivans excel at comfortably transporting families. Second and third row seats are roomy enough for adults. Cavernous rear cargo holds offer abundant space for luggage, groceries, sports gear, and more. Advanced seating configurations enable flexible load options. Family Friendly Amenities From rear seat entertainment systems to multi-zone climate control, top minivans are designed with families in mind. Conveniences like hands-free liftgates, charging ports, cupholders galore, and expansive storage make trips easier. And kid-focused details please the smallest passengers. Updated Safety Tech and Infotainment Today's minivans provide the latest high-tech driver assists and infotainment options. Safety features include automatic emergency braking, blind spot warning, lane keeping assist, and more. Entertainment comes from large touchscreens, Wi-Fi hotspots, and headphone accessibility. Fuel Efficiency With the rise of hybrid models, minivans now deliver impressive fuel economy.
This saves money while reducing environmental impact. Hybrid versions with 36+ mpg make running errands and daily commuting more efficient. Yet hauling power is never compromised. These core strengths demonstrate why modern minivans keep families happy. But what about shoppers needing more hardcore cargo and towing abilities? For that we turn to full-size vans. The Best Full-Size Vans for 2023 When cargo capacity and commercial duty call, only a full-size van will do. Here are the leading choices: Ford Transit Ford Transit The Transit rules as America's best-selling full-size van, offered in multiple sizes and configurations. This workhorse is ready for any task. Key attributes: Class-leading cargo room and payload rating Efficient gas and diesel engine options Easy to maneuver for its size Available all-wheel drive Highly customizable options No matter what the job, the Transit gets it done. Mercedes Benz Sprinter Mercedes Benz Sprinter With its European styling and engineering, the Sprinter brings premium touches to full-size vans. It delivers unmatched refinement. Notable features: Powerful yet fuel efficient diesel engine Five body configurations plus 4x4 capability High degree of customization Elegant and comfortable cabin Class-leading safety technologies The Sprinter merges work duty with Mercedes luxury. Chevrolet Express Chevrolet Express The venerable Express remains a trusted full-size van for commercial uses. This brawny hauler provides power and durability. Top traits: Strong V8 engine muscle Proven reliability and longevity Up to 278 cubic feet of cargo room Available passenger version seats 15 Excellent value for money The Express handles jobs big and small while resisting the rigors of work. GMC Savana GMC Savana Close corporate cousin to the Chevrolet Express, the Savana boasts similar toughness and versatility. It focuses on brute strength. Key assets: Towing capacity up to 10,000 pounds Huge cargo volume capability Optional heavy-duty trailering package Powerful V8 engines Excellent large work van value The Savana ranks among the brawniest full-size vans for the toughest assignments. In the full-size van arena, these stalwart models continue setting the standard. Next let's examine the unique abilities of these trucks. Capabilities of Full-Size Vans Beyond sheer size, full-size vans provide a range of talents tailored to commercial and fleet use. Towing and Cargo Capacity With expansive cargo bays and strong engines, these vans can haul insane amounts of gear or cargo. Maximum tow ratings exceed 10,000 pounds for taking equipment trailers and vehicles to job sites. And cargo room ranges from 200+ to 500+ cubic feet depending on configuration. Commercial Upfitting Options These vans serve as blanks canvases to customize for specific commercial and vocational needs. Upfitting options include shelving, ladder racks, toolboxes, generators, wheelchair lifts, and more. Fleets outfit them as mobile workshops fully customized for their work. Passenger Configurations Certain full-size vans like the Express and Sprinter adapt for shuttle bus and van pool transportation. Passenger models can carry 10, 12, or 15+ occupants thanks to removable seating that creates open floorplans. Power and Durability Robust V6 and V8 engines deliver the muscle needed for hard work. These motors churn out over 300 horsepower along with stout torque. Rugged body-on-frame construction and heavy-duty components allow full-size vans to withstand years of daily punishment on the job. Hundreds of thousands of miles of reliable service is common. This combination of capabilities makes full-size vans essential for many trades and delivery services needing serious cargo or towing abilities. Of course, choosing the right van involves carefully analyzing your needs...
Choosing the Right Van The ideal van for you depends on weighing several important considerations: Assessing Your Needs Honestly evaluate how you will use your van most of the time. Key questions: Will you regularly need to carry passengers or prioritize cargo capacity? What payload and towing capabilities are required? Do you plan commercial upfits or mods to the van? Is fuel efficiency a deciding factor? Answering these questions will guide you to the optimal van category and features. New vs Used Considerations New vans ensure you get the exact options you want, while used may offer affordability. Evaluate upfront cost, predicted reliability and maintenance, included warranty coverage, and financing terms when deciding between new or used. Also inspect any used vans thoroughly before purchase. Reviews and Test Drives Don't rely purely on specs and photos. Read expert reviews and test drive top contenders yourself to get a true feel for each van. Focus on cabin comfort, driving dynamics, visibility, utility of cargo and passenger space, ease of access, and how they fulfill your needs. Identifying the best van for you requires hands-on experience. Taking time to weigh these important factors helps ensure you select the ideal van for your specific transportation requirements, whether personal or professional. With this comprehensive overview and expert advice, you can confidently shop for the perfect van. Let me know if any other questions come up! FAQs What is the most reliable minivan brand? According to various sources, including CarMax, U.S. News, and Kelley Blue Book, the Toyota Sienna is one of the most reliable minivans for 2023. Other reliable options include the Honda Odyssey and the Chrysler Pacifica. Do new minivans have good safety ratings? Yes, new minivans generally have good safety ratings. The 2023 Honda Odyssey, for example, has a 5-star overall safety rating from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and is an Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) Top Safety Pick. Other minivans with high safety ratings include the Toyota Sienna and the Kia Carnival. What is the least expensive full-size van? According to TrueCar, the 2023 Ford Transit Connect is the least expensive full-size van, with a starting price of around $28,000. Other affordable options include the Ram ProMaster City and the Nissan NV200. How much can full-size vans tow? The towing capacity of full-size vans varies depending on the model and configuration. The 2023 Ford Transit, for example, has a maximum towing capacity of up to 7,500 pounds, while the 2023 Ram ProMaster can tow up to 6,910 pounds. Should I buy or lease a minivan? Whether to buy or lease a minivan depends on your personal preferences and financial situation. Leasing a minivan may offer lower monthly payments and the ability to drive a new vehicle every few years, but you won't own the vehicle at the end of the lease. Buying a minivan may offer more long-term value, but you'll have to pay higher monthly payments and may have to deal with maintenance and repair costs. It's important to consider your budget, driving needs, and future plans before deciding whether to buy or lease a minivan. #Wiack #Car #CarInsurance #CarRental #CarPrice #AutoLoans
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Vans offer unique advantages over other vehicles when you need serious hauling power, passenger space, or commercial capabilities. With so many options on the market, it can be tricky choosing the ideal van for your needs. This comprehensive guide covers the leading minivans and full-size vans for 2023. We'll overview the top-rated models in both categories and discuss key features and strengths of the best vans. Whether you need family-friendly transportation or a versatile work vehicle, these recommendations help you find your perfect match. Let's dive in and review the cream of the crop when it comes to vans. The Best Minivans for 2023 Minivans bridge the gap between spacious family vehicles and car-like maneuverability. Here are four standout choices for 2023: Chrysler Pacifica Chrysler Pacifica The Pacifica reigns as the most luxurious minivan you can buy. With seating for up to eight, you'll ride in comfort and style. Signature features include: High-end cabin materials and attention to detail User-friendly infotainment and connectivity Segment-exclusive Stow 'n Go folding second row seats Hybrid option with 33 mpg combined fuel economy The Pacifica remains unmatched for those wanting a premium family hauler. Honda Odyssey Honda Odyssey The Odyssey delivers exceptional comfort, convenience, and safety. This perennial top seller provides family-friendly flexibility. Key strengths: Spacious eight-seat cabin layout Handy storage solutions throughout Kid-focused rear entertainment system Advanced driver aids and excellent crash test results For those needing serious interior versatility, the Odyssey can't be beat. Toyota Sienna Toyota Sienna Now exclusively a hybrid, the Sienna offers outstanding fuel efficiency without sacrificing roominess. This tech-savvy people mover keeps the whole family happy. Notable attributes: 36 mpg combined fuel economy Available all-wheel drive Standard seven-seat configuration User-friendly infotainment and connectivity Extensive active safety features The Sienna pairs hybrid efficiency with Toyota's renowned quality and durability. Kia Carnival Kia Carnival The Carnival brings unexpected style and luxury to the minivan segment. This new-for-2022 model combines innovation with value. Key highlights: Striking SUV-inspired design Palatial passenger room High-end details and materials throughout Abundant tech and infotainment features Smooth handling and ride quality The Carnival is a home run for families wanting a modern, refined minivan. This quartet represents the cream of the crop for today's minivan offerings. Now let's discuss the must-have features and benefits of top minivans. Key Features of the Best Minivans The leading minivans for 2023 deliver an ideal blend of practicality, comfort, and innovation. Here are some of their most important attributes: Passenger and Cargo Room With seating for seven or eight, minivans excel at comfortably transporting families. Second and third row seats are roomy enough for adults. Cavernous rear cargo holds offer abundant space for luggage, groceries, sports gear, and more. Advanced seating configurations enable flexible load options. Family Friendly Amenities From rear seat entertainment systems to multi-zone climate control, top minivans are designed with families in mind. Conveniences like hands-free liftgates, charging ports, cupholders galore, and expansive storage make trips easier. And kid-focused details please the smallest passengers. Updated Safety Tech and Infotainment Today's minivans provide the latest high-tech driver assists and infotainment options. Safety features include automatic emergency braking, blind spot warning, lane keeping assist, and more. Entertainment comes from large touchscreens, Wi-Fi hotspots, and headphone accessibility. Fuel Efficiency With the rise of hybrid models, minivans now deliver impressive fuel economy.
This saves money while reducing environmental impact. Hybrid versions with 36+ mpg make running errands and daily commuting more efficient. Yet hauling power is never compromised. These core strengths demonstrate why modern minivans keep families happy. But what about shoppers needing more hardcore cargo and towing abilities? For that we turn to full-size vans. The Best Full-Size Vans for 2023 When cargo capacity and commercial duty call, only a full-size van will do. Here are the leading choices: Ford Transit Ford Transit The Transit rules as America's best-selling full-size van, offered in multiple sizes and configurations. This workhorse is ready for any task. Key attributes: Class-leading cargo room and payload rating Efficient gas and diesel engine options Easy to maneuver for its size Available all-wheel drive Highly customizable options No matter what the job, the Transit gets it done. Mercedes Benz Sprinter Mercedes Benz Sprinter With its European styling and engineering, the Sprinter brings premium touches to full-size vans. It delivers unmatched refinement. Notable features: Powerful yet fuel efficient diesel engine Five body configurations plus 4x4 capability High degree of customization Elegant and comfortable cabin Class-leading safety technologies The Sprinter merges work duty with Mercedes luxury. Chevrolet Express Chevrolet Express The venerable Express remains a trusted full-size van for commercial uses. This brawny hauler provides power and durability. Top traits: Strong V8 engine muscle Proven reliability and longevity Up to 278 cubic feet of cargo room Available passenger version seats 15 Excellent value for money The Express handles jobs big and small while resisting the rigors of work. GMC Savana GMC Savana Close corporate cousin to the Chevrolet Express, the Savana boasts similar toughness and versatility. It focuses on brute strength. Key assets: Towing capacity up to 10,000 pounds Huge cargo volume capability Optional heavy-duty trailering package Powerful V8 engines Excellent large work van value The Savana ranks among the brawniest full-size vans for the toughest assignments. In the full-size van arena, these stalwart models continue setting the standard. Next let's examine the unique abilities of these trucks. Capabilities of Full-Size Vans Beyond sheer size, full-size vans provide a range of talents tailored to commercial and fleet use. Towing and Cargo Capacity With expansive cargo bays and strong engines, these vans can haul insane amounts of gear or cargo. Maximum tow ratings exceed 10,000 pounds for taking equipment trailers and vehicles to job sites. And cargo room ranges from 200+ to 500+ cubic feet depending on configuration. Commercial Upfitting Options These vans serve as blanks canvases to customize for specific commercial and vocational needs. Upfitting options include shelving, ladder racks, toolboxes, generators, wheelchair lifts, and more. Fleets outfit them as mobile workshops fully customized for their work. Passenger Configurations Certain full-size vans like the Express and Sprinter adapt for shuttle bus and van pool transportation. Passenger models can carry 10, 12, or 15+ occupants thanks to removable seating that creates open floorplans. Power and Durability Robust V6 and V8 engines deliver the muscle needed for hard work. These motors churn out over 300 horsepower along with stout torque. Rugged body-on-frame construction and heavy-duty components allow full-size vans to withstand years of daily punishment on the job. Hundreds of thousands of miles of reliable service is common. This combination of capabilities makes full-size vans essential for many trades and delivery services needing serious cargo or towing abilities. Of course, choosing the right van involves carefully analyzing your needs...
Choosing the Right Van The ideal van for you depends on weighing several important considerations: Assessing Your Needs Honestly evaluate how you will use your van most of the time. Key questions: Will you regularly need to carry passengers or prioritize cargo capacity? What payload and towing capabilities are required? Do you plan commercial upfits or mods to the van? Is fuel efficiency a deciding factor? Answering these questions will guide you to the optimal van category and features. New vs Used Considerations New vans ensure you get the exact options you want, while used may offer affordability. Evaluate upfront cost, predicted reliability and maintenance, included warranty coverage, and financing terms when deciding between new or used. Also inspect any used vans thoroughly before purchase. Reviews and Test Drives Don't rely purely on specs and photos. Read expert reviews and test drive top contenders yourself to get a true feel for each van. Focus on cabin comfort, driving dynamics, visibility, utility of cargo and passenger space, ease of access, and how they fulfill your needs. Identifying the best van for you requires hands-on experience. Taking time to weigh these important factors helps ensure you select the ideal van for your specific transportation requirements, whether personal or professional. With this comprehensive overview and expert advice, you can confidently shop for the perfect van. Let me know if any other questions come up! FAQs What is the most reliable minivan brand? According to various sources, including CarMax, U.S. News, and Kelley Blue Book, the Toyota Sienna is one of the most reliable minivans for 2023. Other reliable options include the Honda Odyssey and the Chrysler Pacifica. Do new minivans have good safety ratings? Yes, new minivans generally have good safety ratings. The 2023 Honda Odyssey, for example, has a 5-star overall safety rating from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and is an Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) Top Safety Pick. Other minivans with high safety ratings include the Toyota Sienna and the Kia Carnival. What is the least expensive full-size van? According to TrueCar, the 2023 Ford Transit Connect is the least expensive full-size van, with a starting price of around $28,000. Other affordable options include the Ram ProMaster City and the Nissan NV200. How much can full-size vans tow? The towing capacity of full-size vans varies depending on the model and configuration. The 2023 Ford Transit, for example, has a maximum towing capacity of up to 7,500 pounds, while the 2023 Ram ProMaster can tow up to 6,910 pounds. Should I buy or lease a minivan? Whether to buy or lease a minivan depends on your personal preferences and financial situation. Leasing a minivan may offer lower monthly payments and the ability to drive a new vehicle every few years, but you won't own the vehicle at the end of the lease. Buying a minivan may offer more long-term value, but you'll have to pay higher monthly payments and may have to deal with maintenance and repair costs. It's important to consider your budget, driving needs, and future plans before deciding whether to buy or lease a minivan. #Wiack #Car #CarInsurance #CarRental #CarPrice #AutoLoans
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- July 25th 2023 -
Do you have any plans for tomorrow? Not much. My husband gets home from his last flight around 1 p.m., then we're going to go to the nearby garden center to buy more plants, and I'm probably going to make Tuscan chicken for dinner. But that's all I have planned.
What's the longest movie you've ever seen? The extended edition of The Return of the King. It's a little over 4 hours long.
What movies did you watch a lot as a kid? The ones I remember watching the most were The Lion King, The Land Before Time, and Cinderella.
How many rooms are in your home? 11.
Do you ever experience imposter syndrome? Nope, I can't think of a time where I have.
What was the last place you rode to in a car? As a passenger? Just into town to run errands with my husband, I think.
Do you have a PayPal account? If so, how often do you use it? Yep, I set one up because I make a monthly donation to my state's abortion fund and PayPal is the easiest way to do it. I think I've also used it for a few online shopping orders, too.
Are you cold right now? Nope.
How old will you be at your next birthday? 34.
Before this one, when was the last time you took a survey? A few days ago.
Can you skip rope? I haven't used a jump rope since I was a kid, but I'm sure I'd still remember how.
Have you ever participated in a charity fundraising event? Yep, numerous times. Maybe like 10?
What is your hair like at the moment? It's in a ponytail.
Do you like cucumber? Yes I love cucumber.
What do you like and dislike about your job? (or your last job) I like that I hardly work LOL. It takes me only a few hours a week to check my stock positions, look for potential stocks to buy, etc. And I like that I can work whenever I want, and I can take huge chunks of time off of work. And some things I dislike about it is that it's kind of monotonous, and it takes a little longer to do my taxes and makes it slightly more complicated.
Have you ever had a dream job? If so, did you give up on it, and why? Or do you happen to have that dream job? Yeah, my first airport operations job was my dream job at the time. I absolutely loved managing ground ops at that little airport, and I had a great boss and coworkers. I didn't give up on it, but I left and got a similar job at a different airport when my husband and I moved to Virginia for his airline career in 2013.
What's the last sitcom you watched? I think it was Parks and Rec.
What car did your parents or guardian drive when you were growing up? They had a bunch over the years. They had two Saab sedans when I was really little, then they got a Chrysler minivan in 1996 and my dad had a company car provided by his employer. They'd update the minivan every few years - they had two or three Honda Odysseys after the Chrysler, and my dad also got a new company car every few years.
Do you have milk in your fridge right now? What kind? Yep. 2 percent.
Are you left or right handed? Right.
If you have your ears pierced, how old were you when you got them done? I was 14.
Do you have any other piercings? Nope.
What was the last thing you wrote down in the notes app on your phone? I have a note that uses a script that I wrote to record when I take my anti-arrhythmia medication (so that I never forget if I did/didn't take it). I use my phone to scan a NFT sticker on the prescription bottle, and then the script records the date/time in the Notes app. As for what I last wrote down in there manually… it was a funny nickname that I randomly thought of for one of my birds, and I didn't want to forget it.
Have you ever been on a winery tour? Yep.
When was the last time you were hungover? I've only been drunk/hungover once. It was in 2012, on my honeymoon. We went to an all-inclusive resort in the Caribbean (so, alcohol included), and I was like… hey why not, might as well see what it's like to be drunk. Turns out I hated the feeling of being drunk LOL. Never again.
Do you still have Facebook? If so, how often do you check it? Yep. I go on there maybe once a month.
Are you wearing your favourite colour today? My pants are navy blue, but they're a bit darker than the shade of dark/navy blue that I consider to be my favorite.
Would you ever want to visit South Korea? Eh, possibly. It used to be higher on my list of places I'd want to go, but the more I read about South Korea and the more I learn about their cultural problems with xenophobia and misogyny, the less interested I am in visiting.
How many times in your life have you been in love? Just this once.
Do you like your name? Yep.
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2023 Honda Odyssey Hybrid Colors, Release Date, Specs
2023 Honda Odyssey Hybrid Colors, Release Date, Specs
2023 Honda Odyssey Hybrid Colors, Release Date, Specs – The 2023 model that is being released of the Honda Odyssey Hybrid will be affected by many enhancements. This minivan was supposed to be unveiled in the course of the 2020 New York City Auto Show this Apr. The show was late until August due to the fact of the outbreak of COVID-19. First, we have got to see the sneak peeks of the arriving…
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#2023 Honda Odyssey Canada#2023 Honda Odyssey Release Date#Honda Odyssey 2023 Discontinued#Honda Odyssey 2023 For Sale#New Honda Odyssey 2023
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