[Duluth, Georgia]. It was a fashion show with a bullet. Derek Molenhour was showing off one of his T-shirts that sported a scary looking dude pointing a pimped-out assault rifle at you.  

The Palast Investigative Team had worked its way into Wednesday’s Trump rally in Duluth, Georgia. One theme is crystal clear: if Harris wins, the MAGA troops are ready for what LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, calls “Civil War Part 2.”

I asked Molenhour, who is selling piles of his assault rifle Tees, what would happen if Harris wins?

The red-capped salesman didn’t hesitate. “The Three Percenters, who are protectors of our nation, as far as militia, not necessarily military, We the People”—pointing to the sea of red MAGA hats, “are going to come together and there’s going to be a revolution.”

If you don’t know the Three-Percenters, take a look at the photos by our photographer Zach D. Roberts who has tracked them across the country for years. They don’t display AR-15s on T-shirts; they carry them on their with extra ammo cartridges on their chest.

Molenhour is confident that the Three-Percenters and other Trump troops would not lose the gun-battles to come. “We the people can overthrow the government if need be because we have more numbers.”

He had no hesitation about using bullets to overthrow the government, what we used to call “treason,” saying, “Jefferson talked about it in the beginning of America.”

And behind it all is the sincere belief, unanimous among the Trump faithful we interviewed, that the last election was stolen by Biden; and, if Trump loses, it could only be because Democrats stole it.

I asked, “You think that that’s what’s going to happen?”

He pointed to the sea of MAGA fanatics waiting for 8 hours in the sun for their Orange Savior and said they would not accept Trump’s loss. “I mean, take a look at this. If [Trump] loses this, then it’s impossible to say that it was not rigged.”

Celeste Duran couldn’t agree more. Festooned in a red-white-and-blue tutu, Trump socks, Trump earnings and other Trump gewgaws, she came close to tears telling us, “They [the Democrats] cheated. There was bushels and baskets full and carloads of, votes that came in in the middle of the night.”

Going to a Trump rally is weirdly similar to a Grateful Dead concert: Like Deadheads, the MAGA-nauts travel from rally to rally—boosting crowds that would be thin if not for the repeat customers who will laugh at the same nasty Trump barbs time after time.

It’s fertile mental compost for conspiracy theories that paint their man as beset by the elites who control the government.  Renee White was standing behind Trump in Butler PA when the ex-President’s ear was split by a bullet.

Lone gunman? Not for Renee. She suggested that the Biden Administration was somehow in on the attempted assassination. “Look at JFK. You know, you look back and you’re talking about the three letter agencies," a right-wing moniker for the FBI, CIA and other agencies.

If the ‘three-letter agencies’ can shoot the Kennedys (part of the catechism of Trump zealots) and try to kill Ronald Reagan (remember that?), it stands to reason that the Deep State can take out their Christ-appointed candidate. (Trumpsters, in signs and T-shirts, proudly proclaim the endorsement of Jesus of Nazareth.)

If you dismiss the threats of civil war bouncing through the crowd as just another Trump freak-show, just machismo bravado, you’d better get your head out of the coastal sand-box. As our expert on (and infiltrator into) uber-Right groups, Roberts says, “They look at J-6 as a practice run. They’ve put their communications ‘underground,’ no longer on Facebook where they can be tracked.” Instead of focusing on January 6, 2025 in Washington DC, they are targeting state capitols to disrupt the certification of Electoral votes on December 11 and the Electoral College voting in those capitols on December 17.  

Not a good sign for a peaceful transfer of power: Roberts noted the crowd was laced with those he identified from the meeting he’d covered a week before in the Pennsylvania woods at the Rod of Iron Ministries festival, a cult that literally worships assault weapons.

Our new film, Vigilantes Inc., documents the threat of gun-toting self-appointed vote-fraud hunters, but the MAGA crowd revels in the bad-boy take-the-law-into-your-own-hands trope. One big-selling tee shows Trump and Vance as vigilantes Wyatt Erp and Doc Holliday ready for their shoot-out at the OK corral.  (In our film, we record a Chairman of the Georgia GOP decked out in full Doc Holliday, including loaded six-shooter.)

Despite the rancid smell of violence, there are some laughs to be had at Trump fests.  My favorites show Trump, shirtless, with a muscled-up build and six-pack abs like a young, steroidal Arnold Schwarzenegger—when they can see with their own eyes that the guy on stage with a bad comb-over has a medical condition known as “body by McDonalds.”  One six-pack Trump cut-out sign proclaims, “Trump:  defender of pets,” with a kitten on his shoulder whom the buff ex-Prez presumably saved from an immigrant Bar-B-Que.  

But if the bullets leave the T-shirts and fly from real guns, the joke’s over. 

We are in Savannah Georgia with the Souls to the Polls buses from Black churches. Frankly, we are in desperate need of funding to make it through the election because we have so many voters we’ve encountered who have been challenged by vigilantes, and so many groups asking for our help and our film. This is the moment, please, if you’ve ever thought of donating to the Palast Fund, we need you now, we truly do.

Greg Palast is the reporter, and Zach D. Roberts co-producer of the documentary, Vigilantes Inc., America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, available on FREE stream.