Documentarian Charlie Sadoff’s new film Against All Enemies is an absolutely chilling look at one of the most dangerous internal threats this country faces – radicalization of former service men into white nationalist militia groups. Groups like the Three Percenters, the Boogaloo Boys, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and their ilk have been a growing threat for some time, with Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas having sounded the alarm about the dangers these fringe groups posed two years. But, as Sadoff lays out, that warning has not been heeded, with the problem slowly growing as a cancer on the American body politic.
The core of Against All Enemies‘s thesis suggests that we are not doing enough to help our veterans after they are discharged from service. Their time in the military fundamentally changes them as people; with time in war zones rewiring their instincts for survival and how they bonded with their fellow soldiers. And it is hard not to argue with it. Military basic training is designed to in some ways tear down a soldier’s individuality and replace it with a sense of esprit de corps.
But once they leave their service, there isn’t any system for adjusting them back to civilian life. These soldiers find themselves adrift in society and alienated from those around them. And that makes them an easy target for recruitment into these quasi-military militia groups, where they find a sense of camaraderie that they felt in the service. Compound this with a social media culture that algorithmically starts to feed these people more and more far right propaganda and we find a situation that could very easily lead to outright violence.
Groups preying on recently discharged military personnel is not a new tactic. Sadoff charts how Ku Klux Klan activity spiked in the post-Civil War, -WWI, and -Vietnam eras, that group’s ranks swelled by veterans of those wars. It comes as no surprise that with the numerous military engagements that the United States has engaged in over the last three decades that we are seeing once again a corresponding rise in the ranks of hate groups.
Sadoff lays out his case for the growing danger that these groups pose clearly and concisely. Northwestern University professor Dr. Kathleen Belew, former soldier Michael Breen, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran and the president of Human Rights First, and former FBI agent Ali Soufan help sketch out the premise with historical context and personal experience. Sadoff also talks with some former military extremist militia members where the consensus seems to be belief in the Big Lie that Trump actually won the 2020 election and other fully fictional Q-anon theories. This is not a bit of bothsides-erism from the director so much as it is to demonstrate the fact free, alternate reality that these people have been seduced into.
At one point, retired Army General Stanley McChrystal sees an alarming outcome if this issue is not addressed; “I think the worst case scenario is probably worse than most of us want to imagine. I could see a civil war.” But what can be done to reverse the course we may be on? A number of those interviewed suggest that a good first step would be for those who are spreading misinformation, election denialism and conspiracy theories to stop, but that does not seem likely. Hopefully, this documentary does serve as a warning that gets heeded and not as an object lesson from which other countries learn not to make the same mistakes we did.
