Far-right militias are using Facebook to organize ahead of the US presidential election. After lying low for several years in the aftermath of the Capitol riot on January 6, militia extremists have been quietly reorganizing, ramping up recruitment and rhetoric on Facebook—with apparently little concern that Meta will enforce its own ban against them, according to new research by the Tech Transparency Project shared exclusively with WIRED. These groups, which are set up locally, encourage members to engage in combat training and recruitment.
Today on WIRED Politics Lab, we discuss Facebook’s culpability, and what this means as we head into November.
Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. David Gilbert is @DaithaiGilbert. Tess Owen is @misstessowen. Write to us at politicslab@WIRED.com. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter.
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
David Gilbert: Hey there. I'm David Gilbert, senior reporter on the WIRED Politics team. Before we begin today's podcast, I wanted to mention that we're putting together an episode all about disinformation. Think about it as WIRED's guide to disinfo, and we need you to be a part of it. What questions do you have about disinfo? We want to hear it all. We'll be reading through the mailbox and answering your questions on the show. So please send us your questions related to disinformation to politicslab@wired.com. That's politicslab@wired.com. And one more thing, if you haven't checked out our newsletter, please sign up. There's a link in our show notes. Thanks.
Leah Feiger: Welcome to WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I'm Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED. Today on the show we're talking about an exclusive WIRED story that just dropped today. It details how far-right extremist militias are organizing online, specifically on Facebook. After laying low for several years, militia extremists have been quietly reorganizing. They formed a couple hundred Facebook groups and profiles, both public and private to recruit and assemble local militia activity across the country. This isn't allowed per Meta's own safety standards, but these groups are there coordinating on Facebook ahead of the November election, encouraging combat training and telling followers to prepare. Joining me to talk about all of this is David Gilbert, a senior reporter on WIRED's Politics desk. Hey David.
David Gilbert: Hey, Leah.
Leah Feiger: And Tess Owen, a WIRED contributor and expert on extremism, disinformation, and politics, and the author of the story we're about to dig into. Tess, welcome. You've just spent weeks looking into how these groups are organizing on Facebook. What did you think when you first started looking into this?
Tess Owen: So I was surprised, actually. You had asked me where militias were and what they were up to, and since January 6, we really haven't seen them. They've kind of retreated from the public sphere. And so when I started trying to figure out where they were online, where they were hanging out these days, I was doing the rounds and ended up speaking to an expert. And I was surprised by how brazen some of these groups and organizing efforts are in plain sight on Facebook of all places.
Leah Feiger: Wow. Okay, we got to get into all of this. So what's happening here? They haven't been active in a while. Take us through that.
Tess Owen: Right. We're going to go back to 2020, which is when a kind of perfect storm of factors drew militias out into the streets. We had COVID-19 and the George Floyd protests, and we saw militias showing up to anti-COVID restriction and the lockdown protests. We saw them trying to police George Floyd protests. We saw groups of men with guns in camo swarming government buildings. We saw them setting up checkpoints in Oregon for wildfires. So it was definitely building. And halfway through 2020, Facebook cracked down. So Facebook took action against the militia movement. So things were sort of building and building and building throughout 2020. And then on January 6, we see militias play a major role.
Leah Feiger: And you were there.
Tess Owen: I was. And I've got to say, I mean, what happened that day was so very inevitable based on what had been building, what we'd been seeing in the previous month. I walked up and I saw people scaling the walls of the Capitol and walked around the other side thinking that I could maybe catch my breath and process what I'd seen and kind of go back. And it was swarmed on all sides.
Group: [inaudible 00:03:37] Fuck you police.
Tess Owen: It was absolutely, absolutely insane. I saw someone smashing windows. I was on the steps and someone ran out and said someone had been shot. And I saw Ashli Babbitt being brought out and—
Leah Feiger: Wow.
Tess Owen: … people chasing the ambulance. It was, again, utterly surreal, but not terribly surprising based on everything that we had seen in the previous months. By this point, it had become so normalized to see men in tactical gear at protests.
Leah Feiger: Wow.
Tess Owen: This was just kind of the aesthetic of that moment. And then after January 6, so January 6 put a massive spotlight on the crisis of paramilitary activity in the US and this new scrutiny on groups like the Oath Keepers and the Three-Percenter network who were later sort of implicated in the January 6 violence, that kind of caused the militia movement to retreat from the streets back into their woodland training camps. Some distanced themselves from the word militia altogether. Some split off from the groups like the Oath Keepers. So it went quiet.
Leah Feiger: Which I guess brings us to now where it's not so quiet. How are these extremist militias now organizing on Facebook? What does this look like?
Tess Owen: I think what's important to note is that even though they retreated from the streets, even though we haven't seen really the same amount of armed men in camouflage on the streets, their ideology, the anti-government ideology has continued to tighten its grip on the mainstream. So brings up to now what we've been seeing on Facebook is that there are a good handful of influential militia world individuals who are playing a key role in building networks of Facebook pages, urging others to add "active patriots", openly associating themselves with known militia terms and ideologies. And they're trying to basically facilitate local organizing. And local organizing is always important to the militia movement because they need the in-person training.
David Gilbert: And this training that happens on a local level, a lot of it revolves around firearms training, obviously just going into remote areas, typically in woods, conducting firearms training. But we also see them doing hand-to-hand training so that they're fighting against each other, which comes into use when they're in protests that turn violent against police and other groups. And in a lot of cases, not all of the people involved will have military training, but in some cases there'll be at least one person there who will be running the training. And they are typically highly proficient at what they do. And if you look at some of the videos that have emerged of these trainings, it can look quite terrifying. Now, some of them look quite amateurs, but some of them can look quite scary given how seriously they're taking it and some of the hardware and some of the guns that they're using at the time.
Tess Owen: One Facebook user with ties to a Pennsylvania militia posted a video advertising their combat training and trying to get people involved. It shows people holding long guns, semi-automatic rifles in tactical gear, and some of it looks pretty sophisticated, as David said.
Leah Feiger: Absolutely. Tess, even in your piece, you talk about how some of the people in these Facebook groups claim to be ex-military.
Tess Owen: Right.
Leah Feiger: And so what kind of things are they saying? What do they seem to want?
Tess Owen: So their goals are pretty vague. I mean, it's antigovernment. A lot of their posts sort of convey a general sense of urgency about the need to prepare for a war or to stand up against myriad supposed enemies like drag queens or immigrants or pro-Palestine college students or "communists", the US government, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, George Soros, "globalists". Me, you. This is a pretty massive list. I'm sure everyone's anti-David as well.
Leah Feiger: So what militias are specifically involved here? I mean, you just mentioned the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, but this is looking a little bit different right now. Right?
Tess Owen: So the Oath Keepers is probably the best-known militia because of their role in January 6. Their leader, their founder, Stewart Rhodes, was convicted of seditious conspiracy. And Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, which are a far-right street fighting gang, these were the two groups that federal prosecutors zeroed in on for their role in January 6. The militia movement in general has always operated on quite a local level. Oath Keepers was a very large network with some chapters operating more autonomously than others, but according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of Oath Keeper chapters went from 70 in 2020 down to just five in 2022.
Leah Feiger: Wow. I mean, yeah, they did get off the streets. Absolutely.
Tess Owen: Yeah. The group fell apart. There were some chapters of the Oath Keepers who really didn't like what they saw on January 6. They're like, we are all about respecting police and kind of being backup for police—
Leah Feiger: Interesting.
Tess Owen: … and they weren't happy with what they saw. So they wanted to distance themselves entirely. And then the Three Percenters was the other group that got a lot of scrutiny or other sort of network of groups. And so what we're seeing on Facebook now is a lot of Three Percenters, specifically a network of groups called American Patriot 3%, which is on Facebook's own list of banned organizations, dangerous organizations. And that has been one of the most prevalent militia networks that I've seen come up again and again. But again, people are trying to facilitate local organizing within that network.
Leah Feiger: I mean, that's the thing that was so shocking to me reading your stories. We're looking at this Pennsylvania chapter, this Georgia chapter. It's state by state, it's county by county. Has that always been how these groups have operated or does this feel like a new chapter to you?
Tess Owen: I mean, the militia movement has always tended to operate fairly locally.
Leah Feiger: Sure.
Tess Owen: And it's important that they are local so that they can go about their offline activities. They need to train. Even with these smaller groups, they establish coalitions so that if they need strength and numbers for an event, they can team up. But there's always been a massive emphasis on the need to be sort of forming these groups with maybe your brother-in-law and your neighbor and your colleague or something.
Leah Feiger: Interesting. At the very beginning when we're talking about this, obviously the bar is high for reporting on extremist militias right now in this day and age, three years after January 6th. And some of the things they're saying are unimpeachable, they're clearly, clearly encouraging militia action. I want to read some of these posts out loud. This one post in a 650 member Facebook group called Free American Army reads, "Join your local militia or 3% Patriot group. Now more than ever, support the American militia page." It's so wild. I mean, I knew that these movements hadn't gone away. I knew that these groups hadn't gone away, but to just see this network of Facebook pages of similar posts. I mean, were there any others that really called your attention?
Tess Owen: So there was another one that really caught my attention also in the Free American Army Facebook group, a private group. And this was by the administrator who is himself a part of a federate Three-Percenter group. And it's a picture of a guy in tactical gear with a long rifle. It says, "They aren't ready. They weren't ready for an armed Uber driver. They weren't ready for an armed 17-year-old. They weren't ready for the people fighting back. They aren't ready for those that train. They aren't ready for those that shoot. They aren't ready for those proficient at it. They aren't ready for us. They really aren't. They keep pushing though …"
David Gilbert: Jeez!
Tess Owen: Just a bit ominous.
Leah Feiger: Really ominous. I mean, I'm very curious what the defense is here. How do you even go about saying, "Oh no, militia groups aren't an issue."
Tess Owen: And I mean, some of these groups are more incendiary than others. Sure.
Leah Feiger: Sure.
Tess Owen: And that is also the case with the militia movement. Some of them are literally just a bunch of guys running around the woods and think that they're going to help out if there's an earthquake and there's others who they want to overthrow the government and they have a real bloodlust. There is a bit of a spectrum when it comes to militias and what they want sometimes.
Leah Feiger: Right.
David Gilbert: Tess, do you know, are these Facebook groups new? Have they just been established in recent years since the January 6? Are they kind of old ones that have been kind of reactivated?
Tess Owen: The ones that I've been at have been created in the last couple years. So I've been working with Katie Poole from the Tech Transparency Project, and she's been tracking hundreds of these groups created since 2021 mostly. But she says that there has been an intensification of activity and building these groups, and there's also forming kind of connections between them in the last year or so.
David Gilbert: Is there kind of leaders emerging in those networks or is there less of that now?
Tess Owen: I mean, the extremist landscape in general has been very leaderless since January 6, but there are a few key influencers, I think, who are working as admins for these groups.
Leah Feiger: I mean, I'm sorry. We absolutely have to talk about reality TV star, Bryan Masche.
Tess Owen: Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah. Bryan Masche is the admin for the Arizona group.
Leah Feiger: The Arizona State Civilian Guard. And he was the reality TV star from the show Raising Sextuplets.
Bryan Masche: It was unbelievable. I mean, I was just in awe. Here we were trying to be pregnant. It didn't work. And to be told there's six heartbeats growing inside of your wife—
Leah Feiger: And also a failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate, of course.
Bryan Masche: Naturally.
Leah Feiger: Naturally.
David Gilbert: Everyone is these days.
Leah Feiger: It's actually so true.
Tess Owen: Yes.
Leah Feiger: Yes. But it does seem like these people are emerging and Bryan... Sorry to read another quote, but this one really got me of just the goal of the guard that Bryan is the administrator for for this Facebook account, says that they're advocating and organizing as the people in order to activate the unorganized militia. What is that word salad? What does that even mean?
Tess Owen: Yeah, it's from the Second Amendment, but it's sort of like Mad-Libs Second Amendment garbage.
Leah Feiger: It's wild. And of course, not to poke too much fun, but you had also written in your story that in February, he had shared a link to a Wiki page for the 1946 Battle of Athens when civilians led an armed revolt against their local government. Yeah, you got to read this part for us. This is so good.
Tess Owen: Oh yeah. "Learn your history, folks," I wrote. "The Battle of Athens Georgia was the last successful armed rebellion in the United States since the Revolutionary War."
Leah Feiger: But as our lovely producer pointed out last night, this battle actually occurred in Tennessee, not Georgia. So yeah, sure, there's some new leaders. Tough to say what's happening there. I'm very interested to watch this play out, but this also gets me into how concerned should we all be with this?
Tess Owen: Look after January 6, there was a sense among the anti-government movement that militia was like a dirty word. People tried to distance themselves from the optics of paramilitary activity. And we're seeing maybe that that's changing now, that people are more willing to associate with militias or flirt with the ideas of militias. And we had a township in Michigan forming its own militia in response to new gun laws. We had prominent GOP influencers calling for civilians to form militia cells to assist sheriffs. We had the "God's Army" Christian nationalist convoy to the board earlier this year, and militias kind of tacked onto that, and the FBI foiled a militia plot to launch an attack.
Leah Feiger: So they're out there.
Tess Owen: So they're out there. Everyone always wants to know, will there be another January 6? And all the experts I've spoken to, the consensus seems to be unlikely, but also the problem with anti-government extremism in the US didn't start or end with January 6. And so the groups who are involved, the networks that were involved, the sentiments, the grievances, they're still around. So it's just in terms of how they organize, how they react to whatever future events, it's definitely something that I'm paying close attention to, especially with a sort of emerging activity on Facebook.
Leah Feiger: Definitely something to keep an eye on. We're going to take a short break, and when we're back, we're going to be talking about Facebook's role in this network of militia groups and what this could mean for the November election. If you haven't checked out Tessa's reporting on wired.com, the link is in the show notes. We'll be right back.
[Break]
Leah Feiger: Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. We're going to talk about Facebook's role in propping up this network of militia groups and what this could mean for the November election. So this network of Facebook groups exists. And while we were recording this podcast, Meta, Facebook's parent company actually responded.
Tess Owen: So yeah, we did get the statement back from Meta. I'm going to read it out. They said: "We are removing the groups and accounts that violate our policies. This is an adversarial space where actors constantly try to find new ways around our policies, which is why we keep investing heavily in people, technology, research and partnerships to keep our platforms safe."
Leah Feiger: So that statement is good in theory, but like you've said before, this is whack-a-mole. To be honest, Facebook has been asking both you and David to be-
Tess Owen: And researchers.
Leah Feiger: And researchers for years to be finding these groups for them. They should be finding them themselves and removing them.
David Gilbert: And I think their claim at the end of that statement that they're investing more resources into this is just patently not true because we've heard repeatedly about how they're investing less money in moderation and content and putting it into AI, which clearly doesn't work. They're not hiding this stuff. This is out there. This is easy to spot. If researchers can find it, if Tess can find it, someone at Facebook surely can find it.
Leah Feiger: Even if Tess can find it.
David Gilbert: Sorry, Tess.
Tess Owen: I mean, if posts that contain nudity get flagged, why don't posts trying to organize people into a Three-Percenter militia not get flagged, seeing that Three Percenter is a banned organization and labeled a dangerous organization under their own rules. These are groups and individuals who are openly identifying themselves with ideologies and groups that are banned and labeled as dangerous organizations. I mean, I've reported a lot on the boogaloo movement, the memeified Hawaiian shirt wearing cousins of the militia movement, and the boogaloo movement has found ways to return again and again to Facebook and barely disguising. Sometimes they'll tweak their calling cards or the way that they identify themselves, but they don't have to do much.
Leah Feiger: Facebook cracked down on this activity after January 6th and after they were blamed for letting a lot of election denialism run rampant on the site, right?
David Gilbert: Yeah. They cracked down in, I think it was the middle of 2020 on these groups, and they kicked them off the platform. And I think what that did was that it drove a lot of these groups to more fringe platforms. And I think it's important to recognize that other platforms were also involved in the planning and organization around January 6. Telegram was one of the main channels that a lot of these groups migrated to. We obviously saw Parler was one of the main places where people during January 6 posted all their videos and they all got taken down. And we saw even more fringe sites like a group that was kicked off of Reddit for being too extreme, set up their own website. And after January 6, it was revealed once again, these groups are actively organizing on this website. So it's not just Facebook involved in this, but I think as Tess has pointed out, in order for these groups to reach the biggest possible audience, Facebook is the place where all those eyes are, and that's where they want to be. And now it seems that they're back there again.
Tess Owen: And actually the way that they are constructing these networks is they'll have the public facing groups, which are perhaps a little bit more mainstream. By mainstream, I still mean entrenched in kind of culture war stuff-
David Gilbert: Sure.
Tess Owen: … and conspiracies, but not quite as like, let's take up arms against the government. And so using these kind of more public facing groups, then they can filter people into these smaller private groups which are more extreme to actually sort of organize and direct militia activity.
David Gilbert: And is that all happening on Facebook Tess? Or are they moving them to Telegram or to other platforms, encrypted messaging apps or anything like that? Or are they just creating private Facebook groups?
Tess Owen: There's been some conversations I've seen about moving things to Telegram.
Leah Feiger: Wow.
Tess Owen: But they need Facebook. They need the biggest pool of recruits they can to reorganize and rebuild.
Leah Feiger: It's the gateway. They need Facebook to go mainstream.
Tess Owen: Right.
Leah Feiger: So let's take this to the US election for a minute. How do these groups and networks relate to this and how could they relate to the election in November?
David Gilbert: I suppose from my point of view, I have over the last couple of years been reporting a lot on the election denial movement, election conspiracy groups that it grew out of the 2020 election. And as we saw after January 6, the militia movement way in the basin, we saw people less inclined to talk about militias that are associated with them. But over the course of the last six months, I've noticed these groups have become much more open about their, not necessarily official links to them, but they have been appearing at the same conferences as militia group leaders. They have been—
Leah Feiger: Wow.
David Gilbert: … talking about militias more. They have been discussing potential collaborations between militias and election deniers, and it's very open. Again, it's quite strange how it's happening so openly, I think.
Leah Feiger: I mean, David, you were just at the conference for Constitutional Sheriffs where you were witnessing these conversations take place, right?
David Gilbert: Yeah. So the Constitutional Sheriffs for those who know are a group of sheriffs who believe deeply in the power of the constitution and believe that they are the ultimate authority in their county and are not subservient to federal or state law. So they basically are the last line of defense between everyone and their people.
Leah Feiger: Lovely.
David Gilbert: So this Constitutional Sheriffs movement is, it's pretty small in terms of the numbers of sheriffs who are aligned to it. We don't have an exact figure because they won't say it, but they had a conference in Las Vegas last week where a number of these sheriffs spoke about, they didn't use the word militias, but what they call posses. So these are groups of citizens who they recruit. Some of them are armed, some of them are not. And one sheriff had a posse of 150 people in a county that has 5,000 people.
Leah Feiger: That's a lot of people.
David Gilbert: It's a big proportion of the county who are part of his posse. Now, he kind of said that this was just to help him do his job, but come election time, these sheriffs are also spreading election conspiracies saying that 2020 was a stolen election. We have to do more to protect our election. So if the same thing happens again in 2024 and they see, or they believe that their candidate who is Donald Trump loses the election, the question is what are they going to do? What are their posses going to do? So that's one aspect to it. The other aspect is the fact that people in the wider election denial movement were also at the conference. And one of them, Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com was there and he went on stage and he said that militia is no longer a dirty word or shouldn't be seen as a dirty word. Specifically said that.
Leah Feiger: That totally gets back to what you were saying, Tess.
Tess Owen: I think that part of this renewed willingness to associate with paramilitary groups is also linked to the romanticization of January 6.
Leah Feiger: Totally.
Tess Owen: Because for the months following, there were efforts to sort of pin it on "antifa" or pin it on agitators. We've seen the prosecution of January 6ers and the prosecution of President Donald Trump has also fueled massive anti-FBI sentiment in the mainstream. And I mean, hating the FBI is like part and parcel of what militias do. And so they're speaking the same language since January 6 in that sense. And then also the idea that January 6 has become sort of a lost cause for these groups, I think is also pretty key.
David Gilbert: And I think the January 6 prisoners themselves are no longer referred to as sometimes political prisoners, but hostages is how a lot of people call them. And there was January 6 at the conference in Vegas as well. So all these groups are seeming to kind of come together and they all believe the same thing and all have the same goals. And if they're all talking to each other, the question is how that will play out come November when the election happens.
Leah Feiger: I mean, even from what we've talked about today, I'm trying to wrap my head around all of this, the rise of militia recruitment, the way that this is getting mainstreamed on Facebook, the way that this is getting mainstreamed within conversations of these right-wing events. How is this relating to the GOP? How is this relating to what Trump is saying, to what the GOP is saying?
David Gilbert: I think it is a perfect match because what Trump has been saying for years is that you shouldn't trust the government. And that message has been ramping up since he left government. He's been pushing this idea that the government and oversight that the government has is bad for people. So we've had, as a result, this anti-government sentiment rising up for the last few years. And it's kind of coming to a crescendo now. And at the bottom we've groups like Moms for Liberty who are saying, "You shouldn't trust the government to educate your kids, put money into private school." We have Trump at the top saying, "Don't trust the government. Don't trust Biden. Vote for me instead, and I will give you back everything that you've lost." And then in between we've got these militias who are now rising up and pushing anti-government sentiment. And the really terrifying thing, I think, is we just don't know where those militias are going to end up in the next few months or the next few years.
Leah Feiger: Thanks, David. Something to continue thinking about and keeping track of for sure. We're going to take a quick break and when we're back, Tess and David are going to be sharing their favorite conspiracies of the week.
[Break]
Leah Feiger: Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. I'm Leah Feiger, and this is Conspiracy of the Week, the part of the show that's hopefully slightly more fun than everything we just talked about. Tess, David, what stood out to you this week? What's your favorite conspiracy theory?
Tess Owen: I bring to you a sort of oldie, but a goodie.
Leah Feiger: Oh, fantastic.
Tess Owen: That Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen so that he could eventually be brought back to life, and that his body is being stored under the Pirates of the Caribbean ship at Disneyland.
Leah Feiger: Stop. What? This is so weird.
Tess Owen: Disney made frozen so that when people Googled Disney frozen, a film would come up instead of the speculation that he was cryogenically frozen.
Leah Feiger: Oh my goodness.
Tess Owen: And I was thinking, what would be the problem with Walt Disney being brought back to life? He made charming films for children.
Leah Feiger: Some issues there.
Tess Owen: Yes, yes, yes.
Leah Feiger: Some low-key antisemitism, racism. That works.
Tess Owen: Definitely. But when you consider that people think he was a satanic pedophile—
Leah Feiger: No.
Tess Owen: … the stakes get a bit higher. And I've followed, unfortunately, grooming conspiracies for the last few years. And—
Leah Feiger: Oh no.
Tess Owen: … when they started around Disney, specifically there were concerns that a same-sex kiss in a Buzz Lightyear film was part of an agenda to brainwash children into the sort of LGBTQ agenda, dah, dah. Anyway—
Leah Feiger: Good. Yes. Great.
Tess Owen: … these satanic panics and grooming conspiracies surrounding Walt Disney go back quite far.
Leah Feiger: Wow. Okay. That's a lot of history I don't actually think I knew about. I got to get to the Pirates of the Caribbean.
David Gilbert: I was going to say, I think you need to send Tess to the Pirates of the Caribbean-
Leah Feiger: Yeah, Tess, report back.
David Gilbert: … and report on this.
Leah Feiger: Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous conspiracy. Okay. David, what do you got?
David Gilbert: So my conspiracy this week comes from a group that I've followed for quite a while, and it's an offshoot of the wider QAnon conspiracy, deeply fetishizing John F. Kennedy and his family. So they're kind of known as the JFK QAnon cult.
Leah Feiger: And you've done a ton of reporting on them.
David Gilbert: Yeah, yeah. I have over the years, and they've been going for quite a while now. And even though their leader died last year, they're still pushing ahead with this idea that JFK will suddenly come back to life. And some of them believe that Donald Trump is JFK in disguise.
Leah Feiger: Sure, why not?
David Gilbert: There's a whole thing going on. So this conspiracy that popped up in the last week or so is related to John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane that he used to own and sold back in the '90s. And they finally tracked it down and they know where it is now.
Leah Feiger: Oh no.
David Gilbert: They're now tracking it via flight radar online, so they can see where the flight path goes. So on the 25th of April, which is last week, I guess, they looked at the flight path and they decided that it looked like a bomb.
Leah Feiger: Oh my God.
David Gilbert: So I've seen the flight path. My immediate reaction is that it looked like a 10-year-old's drawing of a penis, but there are some crossovers there. You can kind of think it. But they decided—
Leah Feiger: WIRED Politics Lab gets racy.
David Gilbert: … they decided that it was a bomb, and so they decided that this was a sign from JFK Jr. from beyond the grave via his plane to tell them that something big was going to happen. Now when it's going to happen, we're not exactly sure, but it will.
Leah Feiger: Fantastic. These are really good ones, you guys. I'm declaring this week a tie. Walt Disney, satanic panic, 10-year-old drawings of nether regions, bombs from the JFK QAnon cult. How can I pick? It's a tie.
Tess Owen: Very diplomatic of you.
David Gilbert: Yeah.
Leah Feiger: Thanks for listening to WIRED Politics Lab. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow the show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. Tess, where can people find you?
Tess Owen: You can find me, unfortunately still on X, at @misstessowen.
Leah Feiger: Wonderful. We also have a newsletter, which WIRED senior reporter Makena Kelly writes each week. The link to the newsletter and the WIRED reporting we mentioned today are in the show notes. If you'd like to get in touch with us with any questions, especially your questions about disinfo, comments or show suggestions, please write to politicslab@wired.com. That's politicslab@wired.com. We're so excited to hear from you. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper. Vince Fairchild engineered this episode. Amar Lal mixed this episode. Jordan Bell is our executive producer, and Chris Bannon is global head of audio at Condé Nest. And I'm your host, Leah Feiger. We'll be back in your feeds with a new episode next week. Thanks for listening.
