Shane Bauer, the investigative journalist whose four month stint in a privately run Louisiana prison was one of 2016's most important pieces of journalism, has published a new piece in Mother Jones, this one detailing his time patrolling with the Three Percent United Patriots and other right-wing militias that are preparing for an epic civil war in which the US government will be overthrown and they will be the only citizens of a new country, with everyone else serving as "worker bees...down in the field growing food, gathering wood." Read the rest

Reuters photog Jim Urquhart captured this surreal photograph of Eric Parker, who lives in central Idaho, aiming his gun from a bridge as pro-states' rights protesters assemble at the Bureau of Land Management base camp in Bunkerville, Nevada. The Atlantic has a good explainer on the case, which involves rancher Cliven Bundy not paying grazing fees to the BLM, and now essentially squatting his "ancestral land" with support from a lot of very angry white people with guns. This is militia culture in the United States. Read the rest