Record-scratch moment on the social medias last week after Maine state House Democrats posted a clip of Republican Maine state Rep. Laurel Libby of Auburn, bafflingly asking during a debate over a bill to crack down on paramilitary groups if the Nazis did anything wrong:
“Let’s talk about the Nazis. I would like to know, although I am not posing a question through the chair, I would like to know what they did that was illegal. I would like to know what they did, in detail if folks would like to share, that was wrong, that infringed on another person’s right. Holding a rally, even holding a rally with guns, is not illegal.”
UM.
Then on Sunday, Libby, an anti-vaxxer former nurse who infected her way into the statehouse in 2020 by opposing COVID lockdowns, fussed to her local CBS channel that she had been gotcha misunderstood! It was just NEO-Nazi ralliers she was talking about: “It was taken completely out of context. I find it to be pretty disgusting, frankly, and manipulative. Everyone who’s watching that clip thinks I’m a 1930s and ’40s Nazi sympathizer.”
How very dare you, everyone!
“She says she stands by her words, likening it to kneeling during the national anthem,” says the local news.
The bill is not about rallies or protests, though, but paramilitary training groups that have founded year-round summer camps for grownups in the Maine woods. Not Kaepernick football camps, either, but ones where white supremacists teach one another how to craft bombs, disrupt supply chains with snipers, and sing songs around the campfire about plotting to overthrow the government and kill all the brown, Jewish and gay people.
The group that inspired the bill is led by one Christopher “The Hammer” Pohlhaus, a former Marine who claims he left the service when Barack Obama was elected because serving under him would violate his white supremacist beliefs. In 2022 he migrated to Maine from Texas, or maybe Arizona, and bought 10.6 acres in Penobscot County with a guy who calls himself Fred the Felon for their group The Blood Tribe.
Blood Tribe is best known for dressing up in matchy-matchy red and black masked outfits and parading around with swastika flags and guns screaming “Seig Heil!” hoping to terrorize people trying to attend drag story hours and brunches in Ohio. They’ve also glowered outside of Disney World, and flown their black-and-white swastika flags at the Tennessee state house. And they also found the time to make themselves known in their chosen state, stomping around Lewiston with the group NSC-131 to flap a “KEEP NEW ENGLAND WHITE” banner, skulking at the state house in Augusta, and pouting around Portland, ironically demanding that Somali immigrants leave “my state.” Growled Pohlhaus, “you don’t want to wait until Mainers give us the green light.” Riley June Williams, the Jan 6er who stole Nancy Pelosi’s laptop, was also a frequenter of Pohlhaus’s Telegram group.
Blood Tribe chose Maine to train for the forthcoming race war because it’s already 93 percent white, and they are lazy. Plus it’s a nice place for manly white men to hang out together doing man things. “I have a tight-knit community of guys that, you know, we want to live near each other,” Pohlhaus Nazisplained to Ben Makuch of Vice News. “To make Maine a [Nazi] state would take very, very little effort and change to their mentality and the demographics of the state.”
As it turned out, though, the whites of Maine did not greet them as liberators. Pohlhaus got banned from Planet Fitness for swanning around with his shirt off and flexing his swastika pectoral tattoo, and when a friend of his wrote a letter to the newspaper to complain, Hatewatch got tipped off and sussed out from public property records that he had moved to Springfield. Reporters then started ringing up asking him questions about what he was up to, which violated his safe space.
“We made the decision to sell the 10 acres that was in my name up here,” he sniffed on his Telegram channel last November. “With the militant leftist doxing the location, it was basically too dangerous to fulfill its purpose to be a safe space for families to make the transition up here. People were coming up there all the time, snooping and getting very brazen, even driving down into the clearing.”
Can’t a man and his man friends just fly their Nazi flags and train at Planet Fitness for the forthcoming race war in peace! Pohlhaus says he’s planning to buy more property in Maine, though, and will maybe not put his own name on the deed this time. Have they considered Russia? Russia is nice.
It’s not just the Nazis who appreciate the umbrageous beauty of Maine. In 2021, 11 members of a black Muslim sovereign-citizen group called Rise of the Moors were arrested with a whole bunch of weapons in Massachusetts, en route to some unidentified paramilitary training camp up in the Pine Tree State. Who knows what-all is going on with who up in those woods?
So, Maine Democrats decided they needed a bill about it. Organizing as a militia actually already is illegal, as the Maine Constitution forbids private military units from operating outside state authority. Maine law makes it a crime for groups of people to organize as private militias without permission from the state with an exception for military re-enactors. Me. Stat. tit. 37-B, § 342(2) already provides that “[n]o group of persons, other than federal or state military forces, may join together as a military organization or parade in public with firearms.” Parading around with guns in matchy uniforms would sure seem to fit the bill, but no prosecutor has ever tried to enforce it. Even states with such laws on the books, like Michigan, have never used their anti-paramilitary laws, even when one such group tried to kidnap the governor. There’s usually other, easier charges to hit a local Y’all Qaida cell with.
The Maine bill, which passed by one vote and is now on the desk of Democratic governor Janet Mills, outlaws “unauthorized” paramilitary training, and was watered down to require prosecutors prove a person was intentionally or knowingly teaching or practicing the use of firearms, explosives or other techniques in order to cause “civil disorder.” It’s a lot of proof required, for only a misdemeanor and $1,000 fine. The bill would also let counties pursue injunctive relief to get encampments shut down.
So it’s not the strongest of legal tools, but it’s something, and still too much for Laurel Mills. At least it’s a virtue signal that Maine is not greenlighting paramilitary groups as Pohlhaus seemed led to believe? Even though Tucker Carlson and Leonard Leo have vacation homes there, the state went for Biden and the governor is a Democrat, so maybe he should have Googled.
On the federal level, Rep. Jamie Raskin and Senator Edward J. Markey are also trying to pass a federal bill, the Preventing Private Paramilitary Activity Act, which would prohibit military training and cosplay that aims to deprive people of Constitutional rights, if Congress were ever to become willing and able to pass anything.
The US’s biggest terrorist threat is domestic, of course, according to the intelligence community and anyone with eyeballs. And laws are slow, and weak. It’s not likely that the police are going to arrest away our domestic terrorism problem. The good news is that the Nazis are also slow and weak. Even the whitest state in the union doesn’t want them, and a revoked gym membership sends them into a total conniption. Hugging them is not going to earn Laurel Libby more votes in Maine.
Wonder where they’ll pop up next?