If you go to the Southern Poverty Law Center looking for information on Jordan Jereb, you’ll find an article from 2014 that basically mocks him for missing the interview he requested because he had been arrested.
Jordan Jereb, head of The Republic of Florida militia group, wanted to be famous. But when
opportunity finally knocked, the man who liked to roll down hills as he played Army was nowhere to be found. It turned out his outlaw fantasies had finally caught up with him.
I wanted to know more about Jereb because he’s in the news today claiming that yesterday’s school shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz was “a member of his group and participated in paramilitary drills in Tallahassee.”
What I learned from the SPLC wasn’t comforting. They sent representatives to Tallahassee four years ago to interview Jereb because he had reached out to them repeatedly looking for recognition. When he didn’t show for the interview, they investigated and tracked him down at the Leon County jail where he and a friend were in custody for “trespassing after allegedly entering their old high school.”
The SPLC says local law enforcement “had grown increasingly worried of the threatening rhetoric coming from Jereb and his friends.” They also say that his group was “a would-be militia made up of kids barely old enough to buy guns.”
Reading the piece made me somewhat skeptical about whether Jereb should be believed when he says that Cruz was a member of his group. After all, it’s clear that he wants publicity, so maybe this is just a way to get his name in the news.
On the other hand, some pieces line up. For one, I’ve seen comments from students at the school who said that Cruz was obsessed with a girl there and had stalked her. Jereb is quoted as saying Cruz “had ‘trouble with a girl’ and he believed the timing of the attack, carried out on Valentine’s Day, wasn’t a coincidence.”
That, combined with the fact that in 2014 the SPLC saw his Republic of Florida militia as populated with kids barely old enough to buy a gun makes me think that Jareb could be telling the truth.
The fact that the SPLC investigators chose to portray the group as more ridiculous than menacing looks like a potential error on their part:
Jereb had been posting an onslaught of videos for months. Filming with a handful of high school friends, Jereb and company had warned of a tyrannical global power running the world, instructed viewers on knife fighting and emergency “bug out” bags — and more than a few videos showed Jereb rolling down hills in what was supposed to be a demonstration of paramilitary tactics and training.
It all looked pretty silly, like the kids who hang out at the Army surplus store after school and play army while their friends are out chasing girls.
In explaining why they made the trip to Tallahassee at all, they said they wanted to learn what Jareb “hoped to achieve by embracing just about every right-wing ideology there is — from neo-Confederate calls for secession, to survivalism and prepping, even the occasional Nazi salute in front of a webcam.”
They didn’t get their answers back in 2014. But Jareb told the Associated Press last night that “his group wants Florida to become its own white ethno-state” and that “his group holds ‘spontaneous random demonstrations’ and tries not to participate in the modern world.”
Tallahassee is a long way from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, so Cruz must have learned about the Republic of Florida militia through the Internet or some white supremacists he met up with in southern Florida. However it happened, I doubt the relationship was a positive one. For a kid whose adoptive parents were both deceased and who had obvious social and behavioral problems, he might have finally found some acceptance in this group of hate-mongers. They let him participate in some paramilitary drills, filled his head with poison, and sent him on his way.
But don’t expect them to take any responsibility for what happened:
Jordan Jereb told The Associated Press that did not know Cruz personally and that “he acted on his own behalf” and is “solely responsible for what he just did.”
I’d like to know how that defense would work for a leader of ISIS after someone they trained committed an act of mass murder.
“I’d like to know how that defense would work for a leader of ISIS after someone they trained committed an act of mass murder.”
First you’d have to prove training actually occured. Seriously, that’s not snark. Most of these guys can’t even talk a good line. Rolling down a hill? 200 years of Marine drill sgts are rolling around in their graves right now. Its not done that way. These guys for the most part, use velcro strapped shoes because shoelaces take too much coordination.
Theres a reason militia wannabes AREN’T in a militia: No discipline at all.
Shit, they can’t even deny themselves bacon.
With all due respect – and I mean that – this particular line of argument annoys the hell out of me. You may not think much of the “training” these people receive, but getting in a group of like-minded folks and listening to them and learning to identify with them and tromping through the woods with them matters. Its called identity formation. Whether they learn to tie their shoes is not the point.
One of these fuckers just killed seventeen people. He may or may not have been radicalized in the equivalent of a Hulk Hogan terrorist cell, but with access to these kinds of weapons you don’t really need to be well-trained, do you?
This snarky “lets dismiss and laugh at these people because they can’t shoot straight” stuff is getting old. And they just keep on killing people.
The time for snark about this shit is over.
I would agree with you except for one salient fact: I can’t think of ONE school shooting where the perpetrator(s) was a member of any kind of militia at all. Or that had any training at all.
Your worried about the radicalization of youth by big talkers. I agree with you. Unfortunately, unless you know something I don’t, we CANT STOP THAT.
White, male terrorism. Its not codified, its not trained, its not identifiable.
Spending resources on jackasses that circle jerk in the woods is not going to do anything except romaticize them for the next generation of losers.
I say this in an entirely unmocking way – there is probably a lot more undiagnosed mental illness in the world than people realize. I have several relatives over several generations that have ranged from diagnosed mental illness requiring extended repetitive institutionalization to less severe but still diagnosed, legally disabling illness to what I would call mild, undiagnosed non-trivial extended (years) episodes of irrationality.
It’s the last group that seems to me to be much larger than statistics might show.
I’ve always been curious about the studies that have correlations between radioactive fallout and standardized test scores and removing lead from gasoline and lower crime rates. Pre-natal alcohol syndrome may also go undiagnosed in mild cases.
Anyway, I’m sympathetic to the possibility that a person like this is not really in as much control of their emotional and mental capabilities as they or others may think.
These are the gun nuts we allow to walk around with their military assault guns strapped across their chests with fingers close to the trigger. That kind of open carry must stop now as there is no reason for the gun nut to have that kind of power.
Until November, I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel.
It is not DJT, it is the Republican Party that has to be the focus of the sane fraction of the voting populace.
Sadly, that faction appears to be much smaller now than it may ever have been.
The national conversation would seem to indicate that.
However, in each local election there are signs that things are changing, even in very conservative areas. The changes in FL, IA, WI local elections, coupled with the VA statewide elections, at least give me hope.
The finding of like-minded crackpots and violent extremist sewage troughs at which to gorge is just another “benefit” of the global internet. Curiously, nothing seems to get an American “conservative” more riled up than arguing that these white male mass shootings should be denoted “terrorism”. They go apeshit at the suggestion, and demand that there be an identifiable “political” component to the killing for an action to be called “terrorism”. Thus, the lone wolf male gun-nut going off on a (predictable) rampage cannot (by definition!) be “terrorism”, QED. One might think that planning to shoot semi-automatic weaponry into hundreds of unarmed civilians might easily fit within the concept of intentionally acting to cause mass “terror”, but whatever….
In any event, the latest young male mass shooter doesn’t seem to have been too ginned up by Trumpite white nationalism. He looks to be a simple gun nut who malfunctioned, a defective product being manufactured in enormous quantities by our failing American society, which celebrates the “freedom” to have the power to kill dozens indiscriminately as opposed to the “freedom” to be allowed to live in peace. The shooter du jour went off the rails at an early age, but of course the Founders’ Greatest Accomplishment protects the right of 18 year old males to buy semi-automatic weaponry, obviously. Just ask Roberts’ Repubs!
“…shooter doesn’t seem to have been too ginned up by Trumpite white nationalism.”
Well he was pictured wearing the uniform. ie: the maga dunce hat.
Thanks, I have since seen that. Likely I spoke too hastily about his level of relish for Trumpism.
Perhaps rightwing politics will end up playing a significant role in this latest act of domestic male gun terrorism.
The victims of that organized violence don’t view that differently from the victims of seemingly random domestic violence. One difference is the numbers of victims.
Some people personalize that ethic. The more lethal the weapon, the more deaths.
How many days go by without a report of familicide such as it is appearing a man had shot his wife and daughter, and then took his own life.
Someone who could read critically and comprehend the entire mess of a Politico article, as I did, would have learned that ADL’s reporting was accurate.
That is, there is no evidence that Jereb did not tell them what they reported he told them.
And multiple confirmations* (though buried deep, deep in the bowels of the article) that he did do so.
Leaving Tikun Olam’s (whoever the hell that is) own “reporting” emitting more than just a faint whiff of the taint of . . . wait, what’s it called again? . . . I know there’s a name for it . . . some technical term of art or other . . . oh, right, I remember it now: anti-semitism.
*e.g.,
Allen West: “My new Sig Sauer MPX 9mm carbine pistol — saw this at the NRA convention. Check out that grouping. YEEHAW.”
○ Congressman Allen West Speaking to Stoneman Douglas JROTC (2011)
. . . equally put out by this rather similar propagation of fake news.
Is it the differing biases of the promulgators that explains that?
What I wrote and you downrated is completely correct and accurate. Anyone with unimpaired reading comprehension who reads the entire article you linked can confirm that (unclear whether that — i.e., unimpaired reading comprehension — includes you; evidence to date this thread says no).
So you got nuthin’. No ability to refute or even credibly rebut anything I wrote.
So you downrate.
You’re pathetic.
Too busy violating the Fair Use Doctrine to pay attention to detail.
. . . the obviousness of “Tikun Olam”‘s axe-grinding bias (i.e., hiding the critical fact that ADL’s reporting was accurate; ignoring Politico’s burying of that lede; singling out ADL for condemnation when AP and ABC were at least equally criticized in the Politico article . . . gosh what’s special about ADL that might explain such special treatment . . . [thinking, thinking, thinking]?)