In a reel shared to Instagram on February 14, an account identifying itself with a group called The 13th Northeast Guerillas put out a call to prospective recruits in Vermont and New Hampshire. What they advertised was fairly benign on its surface: fitness, community, preparation, survivalist training. The video was set to the tune of Kendrick Lamar’s “TV Off” and featured a rapid succession of highly edited images showing armed men posing in the wilderness in tactical gear. They sometimes wore skeleton masks, and everyone had their faces entirely concealed or censored. In many of the images, crucifixes are seen visibly dangling from their necks or sewn onto clothing.
In another post from earlier this year, one of the group's purported members shared a photo of a young man holding an assault weapon with a crucifix displayed over a plaid shirt and his face blurred out. The caption cites Psalm 19:1: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim his handiwork." That quotation is followed by a series of hashtags, including “#militia,” “#wellregulated militia,” “#northeastguerillas,” and “#modernminutemen.”
This group is part of a new guard of paramilitary activists whose youthful membership, edgy aesthetics, use of Instagram, and, in many cases, overt nods to religion points to a new brand of anti-government Christian nationalist militias.
Many of these new groups, whose follower counts range from dozens to thousands, began quietly setting up shop on Instagram over the past two years. The Tech Transparency Project, which monitors extremism online, identified nearly 200 Instagram accounts as “militia related” and categorized dozens of those as part of this new generation of Christian nationalist militias.
Over time, these groups have continued to grow their audience on Instagram, publishing slick propaganda imagery from IRL meetups that often shows groups of armed men with their faces covered or censored. Many of the Christian nationalist groups on Instagram try to hide behind what appear to be businesses—operating merch stores, for example, that are linked to their accounts, which they can use to fund themselves through sales of apparel, tactical gear, patches, or even weapons training.
Experts say that this emergent movement draws on a number of trends in the modern extremist landscape, including that it establishes a paramilitary wing of surging Christian nationalism in the US and reflects the sensibilities of a new generation of fitness-obsessed, “Christ-pilled” young men, some of who call themselves tradcaths. (This is the name for the highly online, far-right community who churn out provocative memes promoting an idiosyncratic interpretation of what they claim to be traditional Catholicism.)
This movement is also growing at a time when the traditional militia movement has been left aging, rudderless, and paranoid since January 6, 2021. The fact that the movement is made up of small autonomous cells loosely connected online is also in keeping with the shift toward hyper-local extremist organizing seen in the past few years.
While the old guard of paramilitary groups looked to Facebook as fertile ground for reaching and radicalizing prospective recruits, this younger generation of wannabe militants use Instagram like any influencer would—commenting on each other's posts or tagging one another as a way to cross-promote, boost their own followings, and strengthen their networks. “It's basically turning ideology into influencer culture,” says Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project. “Instagram is the best platform for that. It’s one of the platforms that influencers have broadly flocked to because they can monetize it easily. It's very visual, and it's been increasingly incorporating features you have on Facebook, like private group messages.”