White, Legally Armed, and Primed for Political Violence

This story is published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence. Subscribe to its newsletters. 

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y Nov. 3, 2020, the day of the presidential election, 44-year-old Ian Rogers had been preparing for the implosion of American civilization for so long that it seemed like a foregone conclusion. He could see the coded signals, the power grabbing, and he was confident it would all culminate in the Democratic Party stealing the White House for Joe Biden and establishing a police state. Rogers, who had spent most of his life in California’s wine country, where he owned a car-repair shop, expected to lose cherished freedoms — in particular, gun rights. A feeling of profound, imminent loss had settled over him. If armed resistance became necessary, Rogers considered himself a man of action. When the election results came in, he decided it was time to move.

Between Nov. 25, 2020, some two weeks after most news organizations declared a Democratic victory, and Jan. 13, 2021, court records show Rogers initiated a series of domestic terrorism planning sessions with his best friend, 37-year-old Jarrod Copeland. Over text messages, they discussed how to carry out an attack against institutions they saw as liberal. Among the targets discussed were Twitter and Facebook, both of which had recently banned Donald Trump; the California governor’s mansion, inhabited by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom; and the Democratic Party headquarters in Sacramento.

“Ok bro we need to hit the enemy in the mouth,” Rogers said in November. “I think right now we attack democrats.” He added, “I’m thinking full auto fire with fire will send the message we want.” Two days later, Rogers sent Copeland a map that showed the location of the state Democratic Party’s headquarters, a low-slung building with rooftop solar panels and charging stations for electrical vehicles. “150 rounds shot into [the] building will destroy it,” Rogers said. “And a couple pipe bombs.” He wanted to “send a fucking message man” and “scare the whole country” and “leave [an] envelope with our demands and intentions” that would effectively state “we declare war on the Democratic Party and all traitors to the republic.”

Rogers and Copeland moved on to logistics. “After work tomorrow I’ll … do some recon,” Rogers said. “I’ll scope things out take pictures.” Copeland told him, “If they don’t listen to trump they will hear us,” and in January texted, “we will become outlaws for real.”

Copeland, who had joined the military in 2013, only to be arrested twice for desertion before receiving an “Other Than Honorable” discharge in 2016, purchased a 10-pack of zip-tie handcuffs. The two men discussed the necessity of “guerrilla warfare,” “surgical strikes,” and “civil war.” Rogers declared them “freedom fighters.”

As January 2021 progressed, the conversation turned fatalistic. Rogers asked, “Are you ready to leave your wife? What I’m talking about we probably will die unfortunately.” Copeland had reservations about that aspect of the plan, but said, “She has finally come around to understanding.”

Ian Rogers owned some 50 firearms, including 13 different types of semiautomatic 1911 handguns, and multiple assault rifles, such as two AR-15s. There were also four illegal automatic weapons: a bipod-mounted, belt-fed, open-bolt MG-42 machine gun; an AK-47 with an under-fold stock; an AK-47 with a side-fold stock; and an M-16. He had stockpiled 15,000 rounds of ammunition and five fully assembled, illegal pipe bombs. Among his weapons were books and manuals: The Anarchist Cookbook, U.S. Army Improvised Munitions Handbook, Homemade C-4: A Recipe for Survival, and U.S. Army Special Forces Guide to Unconventional Warfare. 

Rogers had a stash of steroids, and a Three Percenters militia sticker on his vehicle. He kept a “White Privilege Card” that said “Trumps Everything” and contained the numbers “0045,” an apparent reference to the 45th president of the United States.

Before Rogers and Copeland could carry out their violent plans, police followed through on a tip and arrested Rogers on Jan. 15, 2021. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy and illegal weapons possession and received a nine-year prison sentence. Copeland admitted to his role as co-conspirator and received a sentence half as long. 

From Rogers’ perspective, his plea deal was less an acknowledgement of wrongdoing than a rational response to poor odds. Over the course of his confinement, and despite the facts of the case, his views have remained intact.

Rogers insists he is not violent or a domestic terrorist. “I wouldn’t hurt a fly,” he told me earlier this year, over a prison phone. He is also certain that he is a “patriot” and a “political prisoner.” If he was guilty of anything at all, he said, it was the “cardinal sin [of] being a Republican in America” after Jan. 6.

It is not, from Rogers’ perspective, his fault that he can see hidden machinations, which show that the fix is in. The 2020 election, Rogers wrote to me, was “100% stolen.” And it goes without saying that the Democratic Party is “the greatest threat facing the United States today.” Rogers said, “Just as Rome was brought down by enemies within, we have such traitors amongst us now,” adding, “These people fundamentally hate the country and they will do anything to impose their vision on the nation.”

Rogers told me, as he told law enforcement after his arrest, that he’s an alcoholic, and at the time he and Copeland were planning the attack he was consuming a dozen beers a night. He was drunk, his words were meaningless, not literal, just loose talk in a private chat. “I had no idea the 1st Amendment no longer was in effect,” Rogers later wrote. “That the 1st Amendment was just words on paper, useless, forgotten, replaced by tyranny.”

Rogers, a conservative white man, tall and muscular with tattoos on his shoulders that pay homage to his German and English ancestry, has a conspiratorial mindset. His belief in his innocence requires an ideological reading of the hard facts of his crimes. Conspiracy ties events together into a subversive political plot engineered by Democrats and justifies his actions. This way of thinking has grown more prevalent in the era of Donald Trump and Covid, leading to the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, and radicalization of a man named Vance Boelter, who was charged with shooting two Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses on June 14.

Boelter — doomsday prepper, ardent Trump supporter, white Evangelical Christian — had created a list of 70 targets that included Minnesota’s Democratic congressional delegation and locations for Planned Parenthood, according to law enforcement. In a sermon, he once said, in reference to trans people, “The enemy has gotten so far into their mind and their soul.” When his car was recovered by police, they found multiple AK-47s and flyers for anti-Trump “No Kings” protests, suggesting he planned to show up at one of those events after killing lawmakers and open fire.

In the case of Rogers, evidence makes clear he did not adopt the conspiratorial mindset and acquire the means for an act of violence in a vacuum. By the time he reached the age of 44, he was deep into an indoctrination process that began on his 21st birthday, when he bought his first firearm, a Heckler & Koch USP .40 pistol. 

DESPITE MAKING UP ONLY 30 percent of America’s population, the core of the country’s gun market is composed of white men, or rather a subset of white men, since only a portion of them own and continually purchase firearms. Without these buyers, civilian sales would collapse, which the gun industry knows. Still, the industry is defensive about the role it plays in arming this demographic. The image of such individuals wielding their firearms can bring to mind racial terrorism, violent political radicalism, and mass shootings. Men like Ian Rogers remind the public that in order for an extremist to attack, someone must supply weapons.

More than a decade ago, the National Rifle Association began an attempt at rebranding itself, obscuring this connection. It hired its first prominent Black spokesperson, a young, athletic YouTube influencer and gun enthusiast named Colion Noir. As he began his new role, the organization dispatched a crew to interview him on a gun range. The raw footage, never before made public, shows him dressed in a black baseball cap and long-sleeve shirt. After Noir introduces himself, he says that he’s “passionate about concealed carry,” and rejects the assumption that firearms are for people “living in a rural setting.” The producer points out, “You’re able to bring a perspective that the NRA has not really embraced before,” adding, “talk about that to the camera.” Noir responds, “So, there’s a lot of talk and a lot of mention about my race, obviously. And I can understand that to a degree … considering that there really hasn’t been a Black face of the NRA, so to speak.” He goes on: “I really am appreciative of the opportunity to utilize the NRA’s platform, and I’m also very thankful that they were able to reach out to me and see the need for that and embrace it.”

Noir is no longer with the NRA. He told me, of his time there, that the “organization understood what its perception was to most people; they’re not dumb.” He had creative control over his content, and feels his experience at the NRA was generally positive, but, he acknowledges, “They were absolutely using me. I knew they were using me, and I was fine with it because I inherently believed in what they were doing.”

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the nonprofit that serves as the gun industry’s trade group, has similarly attempted to alter the public’s perception. Working on a parallel track to the NRA, which loudly represents the interests of gun owners, the NSSF is staid by comparison and focuses on ensuring the future of the firearms business. The organization, which declined to comment for this story, quietly lobbies on behalf of dues-paying gun manufacturers and retailers, and every year hosts the SHOT Show in Las Vegas, the industry’s biggest trade event. During the pandemic, amid a record-breaking boost in gun sales, Lawrence Keane, one of the NSSF’s top executives, wrote in a post on the organization’s website that a paradigm shift was underway. “Throw out the stereotypes on American gun ownership,” he said. “They’re just wrong. Against the backdrop of historically high firearm sales, one major theme is shattering misconceptions that America’s gun owners are ‘old white men.’” Keane went on, “Today’s gun buyer looks more like the rest of America.”

The claim was largely driven by the NSSF’s retailer surveys, drawn from hundreds of gun retailers, and was amplified across the national press, which ran headlines like “Why More Black People Are Looking for Safety in Gun Ownership” and “Black Americans Have Been Buying More Guns During the Pandemic.” Unlike NSSF members, the public does not have ready access to the organization’s gun-market research, which provides a view into the industry’s best intelligence. The Trace and Rolling Stone obtained multiple NSSF research documents, including its most recent retailer surveys. In 2018, according to the surveys, 60 percent of gun buyers were white men. In 2020, as other demographics purchased more, that number did indeed drop — to 52 percent. But by 2022 that change had proved to be an aberration, as the number of white male customers once again approached 60 percent. Meanwhile, it was also the case that white men comprised 66 percent of retail staff, demonstrating that American gun culture is largely tribal.

The NSSF’s research also showed that first-time buyers do not account for the bulk of industry profits, comprising less than 23 percent of sales in 2022, a figure consistent with the years before the pandemic surge. That means once the gun industry brings a customer in, it must keep him, a task that requires not only the selling of guns but also the culture and politics of gun ownership. What makes white men in particular susceptible to this messaging is a matter of academic study. The sociologist Jennifer Carlson, a professor at Arizona State University, introduced the concept of the “citizen protector,” a man who experiences a sense of dislocation in today’s America. He may be struggling economically, or feel he’s not succeeding as a provider or a contributing member of the broader society. Deprived of a traditional masculine role, these men reimagine themselves as soldiers on the front lines, an honorable identity that bestows power. 

Many white male gun owners do not neatly conform to this archetype, including enigmatic individuals like Thomas Matthew Crooks, who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump last year, and Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Still, according to Angela Stroud, a sociologist and author of Good Guys With Guns, white men have more than any other group been “thoroughly inculcated with a culture of entitlement.” And yet, she says, “it is also true that white men have not kept up in this economy, even though they’ve been taught throughout history that they’re going to have access to prosperity and power. So what you have is a sense of aggrieved entitlement, and that, in combination with guns, is extremely dangerous.” At the same time, Stroud adds, “The gun industry will do anything to sell you this product. The more fear the better. And in a culture that is becoming void of meaning for many people — the loss of work, community, religion — you can see how someone is not content to be a passive believer; they want to be a doer.” 

From this vantage, it remains the case that Ian Rogers committed crimes, but it is also true that he is a fall guy for an industry that knows its best customers.

ROGERS GREW UP IN SONOMA, a liberal stronghold, in a family of practicing Jehovah’s Witnesses. There were, Rogers said, no firearms in their home, though his father, a mechanic, kept some at his shop. Rogers described his parents as “loving,” and said they didn’t have much money. When it came to the children, they emphasized values. In a letter to the judge who oversaw Rogers’ case, his father wrote that he preached “nonviolence and neutrality in political affairs.”

In high school, Rogers rebuilt car engines and worked for his father. He learned to play the piano, the alto saxophone, and the guitar. When he was 18, he went to Wyoming Technical Institute, where he received an associate’s degree in automotive technology. He became a master technician at 21, the same year he bought the Heckler & Koch USP .40 pistol. He soon married his first wife, Julie Crisci, who would later describe Rogers as “an intelligent, passionate, emotionally sensitive man with a big heart.” The couple had a son together who was around 11 at the time of Rogers’ arrest. By all accounts, Rogers had been a caring, attentive father. He and his son rebuilt a Range Rover together, worked in the yard, and raised hens and roosters. Rogers and Crisci divorced in 2014. Looking back, Crisci wrote, “During our marriage Ian acquired many guns, which became one of his favorite hobbies. He collected guns in the same way I collect earrings or shoes. They were like art to him, and it gave him confidence knowing he could protect many people from harm if there were some disaster to befall us.”

In his twenties, Rogers became a member of the National Rifle Association, and a regular reader of American Rifleman, the organization’s flagship magazine, which provided an education on firearms, the gun industry, and, Rogers told me, “political problems.” He had joined the organization as it was changing. In 1994, an assault-weapons ban was moving through Congress, and the NRA used it as a rallying point, transforming the AR-15 into a symbol of resistance. “The Final War Has Begun,” Wayne LaPierre, then the head of the organization, wrote in American Rifleman. After then-President Bill Clinton signed the bill into law, the NRA spent more than it ever had before on that year’s midterm elections and helped engineer a monumental Republican takeover of the House of Representatives. Violent impulses had been unleashed across the country. Timothy McVeigh, an NRA member, said that the ban was a significant factor in his decision to bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City the following year.

In 1999, two students carried out a mass shooting at Columbine High School. The NRA used the impending threat of further restrictions to reinforce tribal membership, organizing its forces against a common enemy: the Democratic Party. The organization spent heavily in support of Republicans during the 2000 elections. Charlton Heston, then the NRA’s president, said he wanted to “ensure that the Second Amendment was safe from Al Gore,” while LaPierre declared, “The Democratic National Committee is virtually one hundred percent anti-firearms ownership, and the Republican National Committee stands on the side of the freedom.”

Then came an unprecedented national security crisis. Sept. 11, 2001, proved to be a galvanizing moment for the gun industry and how it would market weapons. American troops mobilized for war, backed by fervent civilian support, and the National Guard was deployed across America. Suddenly the AR-15 was everywhere, as authors Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson write in their 2023 book, American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15. “These guys were our new heroes, and guess what they carried?” Doug Painter, who from 2002 to 2011 was the president and CEO of the NSSF, told the authors. “This really became the great unexpected ad campaign for the [AR] rifle.” Gun companies seized on the branding opportunity, explicitly tying civilian gun ownership to American soldiers. Smith & Wesson, for example, advertised that their AR-style weapon was “based upon combat-proven design.” Bill Silver, the head of commercial sales at Sig Sauer from 2005 to 2014, told the authors that the rifles had “the wannabe factor.” He went on, “People want to be a Special Forces guy,” and recalled telling his company’s executives, “I’ll sell as many as you can build.”

Over time, Rogers absorbed the messaging of the gun industry and the NRA. “Without the NRA, the Democratic Party would have banned all guns by now and totalitarian government would have soon followed,” Rogers wrote to me in one letter. Over the phone, he said, “I believe the Second Amendment is the most important amendment in the constitution. I feel it provides protections for all the rest of them. If you take guns, the citizens are now subjects to a tyrannical government.” 

The NRA did not respond to detailed, individual questions outlining the scope of this story. Instead, it emailed a statement that reads: “As the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, the NRA promotes the safe and lawful use of firearms, as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Our Association is comprised of Americans of all creeds and backgrounds — teachers, nurses, truck drivers, and farmers — who love their country and cherish the right to keep and bear arms. With more and more Americans purchasing firearms to protect themselves and their property, we will continue to carry out our mission since day one: to train the public on the safe and responsible use of firearms.”

ROGERS OPENED HIS CAR-REPAIR BUSINESS in Napa in 2005. Soon, he said, “the stress started to take its toll.” There was so much to manage — finances, employees, quality control, customer satisfaction — and it all depended on him. Drinking beer helped Rogers decompress, but alcoholism ran in his family, and it quickly escalated. “Eventually my alcohol intake increased from three beers a night on Friday night and Saturday to 12 beers a night every day of the week,” he told me.

The 2008 election approached. Rogers, still a Jehovah’s Witness, was not permitted by his religion to vote, but he still considered himself naturally inclined toward conservatism, an instinct sharpened by the NRA, which, he told me, “reinforced my core beliefs.” The prospect of Barack Obama’s presidency, and then the reality of it, further radicalized the right. Hysteria over his leadership became an ideology in and of itself. When Rogers was interviewed by police after his arrest, he said of the former president, “I hated him.”

The NRA told its followers, ad nauseum, that Obama would be “the most anti-gun president in American history.” The assault-weapons ban was by this time no longer in effect, but the idea of scarcity animated the gun market. Dealers displayed prints of Obama that commanded, “Get ’em before he does.”

Sales of AR-style weapons in particular accelerated, part of an industry-stoked phenomenon called “panic buying” that Salam Fatohi, the director of research at the NSSF, described in a 2024 deposition. The concept, he said, was widely understood within the industry, and he explained how it mobilized customers. “There’s a rush of retail activity to go and legally purchase firearms that they, as consumers, could possibly not get at a later date,” Fatohi said. “They may not have planned to buy it then, but if it’s going to be gone, they want to get their hands on it.”

The AR-style weapons flowed almost exclusively to white men. The trend is captured in another NSSF study, which sought to provide clients and those who influence public policy with a wide range of “insights” on owners of AR and AK-style rifles, also known as assault weapons. In his deposition, Fatohi described the study’s data as “a very large, usable sample,” and said it could be used to “represent” assault rifle owners. Between December 2021 and January 2022 more than 2,000 owners of these firearms were surveyed online, culminating in a “comprehensive consumer report” that found that 40 percent of respondents acquired their first assault rifle after 2009, and on average each respondent had come to own four. Ninety-six percent of those surveyed were men, and 88 percent were white. Nearly half said they kept at least a thousand rounds of ammunition on hand.

AS OBAMA’S FIRST TERM CAME TOWARD A CLOSE, Ian Rogers was preparing to leave the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He’d decided its approach to Christianity was wrong and the untethering led to a phase of self-discovery. Tribal constraints he’d lived with all his life had been lifted. But a void had also been opened, and it needed filling. Rogers became a Baptist, and, he told me, “got into politics as a hobby.” In 2012, at the age of 36, he voted in his first presidential election, for Mitt Romney. 

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had stretched into their first decade, and their continuation further cemented the country’s partisan divisions. Navy SEALs like Chris Kyle and Marcus Luttrell became conservative pop-culture heroes. In 2013, the NRA was in the process of introducing a new slate of spokespeople, including a former SEAL named Dom Raso. He participated in an interview at a shooting range. The raw footage, never made public, shows Raso, who did not respond to a request for comment, dressed in camouflage military tactical gear, with an American flag patch sewn on the chest. He wears sporty sunglasses, his dark hair is gelled and spiky, and he holds an AR-15. He struggles with his answers, so the director guides him. “I’m assuming you’re going to say something about [how] bad guys are everywhere, we can’t be everywhere, you need to be able to stand up,” she tells him. Raso thanks her for the prompt and says to the camera, “There’s evil everywhere in the world. It’s always going to exist, and it’s never going away. Guys like myself — guys that are like-minded people that want to protect you and other people out there — we want to be everywhere at once to protect everybody, but we just can’t.” After the take, the director explains, “You’re creating — it’s what we talked about today even with your attire. You are creating a persona.”

When Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign took shape, he openly embraced some of the darkest impulses that ran through the gun rights movement, and also framed his run as a final opportunity to stave off cultural extinction. At a rally, referring to Hillary Clinton, he said, “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” adding, “although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.” Trump won the election, and around then Rogers joined an offshoot of the Three Percenters, which Rogers later told police was “basically a prepper group” that interacted on Facebook, held weekly phone meetings, conducted field-training exercises, and hosted barbecues. Rogers told investigators that he’d tried to join the official militia, applying through its website, but never heard back.

If President Obama had presented a marketing opportunity based on scarcity and loathing, then Trump — Obama’s antithesis — required the leaders of the gun rights movement to search for a new way forward. As an internal 2017 NRA memo not previously made public noted, “While the election of President Trump has eased some concerns about threats to our freedoms, it has also unified our opposition. This is no time to rest on our laurels, we must continue to engage with our supporters and the American public.” It spoke of the organization’s new “Freedom’s Safest Place” advertising campaign. “These spots alert Americans to the threats to their freedoms that their leaders would rather ignore,” the memo said. “If we are going to defend our freedom, we must speak clearly and openly about the dangers of terrorism … dishonest leadership … hatred toward our law enforcement … how our culture of political correctness destroys our freedom of speech and religion … and throughout the series, how all freedoms are connected.”

YEARS AGO, I WAS SPEAKING WITH a Florida politician named Dan Gelber, a prominent Democrat who served in the state legislature from 2000 to 2010, and later as mayor of Miami. He told me that a Republican colleague was fixated on the 1984 action film Red Dawn, about high school students who take to the mountains and organize an armed guerrilla resistance to a Soviet invasion of the United States. The colleague, Dennis Baxley, had functioned as a legislative proxy for the gun lobby in one of the most pro-gun states in the country, serving as a primary sponsor for NRA-crafted bills, including Stand Your Ground. In 2003, the organization tapped Baxley to carry legislation that prohibited police from maintaining a database on people who sold guns to pawn shops. To give the bill a sense of urgency, the text invoked the names of Hitler and Castro, and Gelber noticed that the arguments Baxley made in favor of its passage mimicked the premise of Red Dawn. After a hearing, Gelber asked Baxley about his observation. “You cracked the code,” answered the Republican lawmaker, who later confirmed Gelber’s account to me in a text message, adding, “My work on this issue was also influenced by knowing Japan in WWII never attacked the US mainland as they were aware most Americans were armed civilians.” 

Baxley came to mind recently because Rogers also told me he believes that civilian gun ownership deterred Japan from invading the United States mainland. This claim, which surfaces on social media from time to time, is apocryphal, and has been repeatedly debunked, including by USA Today, which found, after interviewing multiple historians, that such an invasion was never in play because Japan, at the time, was “badly overextended” and lacked the requisite resources. 

The popularity of the Japan anecdote shows the power of theater and mythmaking. At times, Rogers ended his text messages to Jarrod Copeland with the word “Wolverines,” as in, “We shoot it up and burn it down, WOLVERINES.” In Red Dawn, the student guerrillas name themselves after their school mascot — the Wolverines. In the end, they prevail, sacrificing themselves for freedom. 

Red Dawn was written and directed by John Milius, who also co-wrote Apocalypse Now and later became something of a conservative icon who served on the board of the National Rifle Association through the 1990s and into the second decade of the 2000s. His movie is a Cold War film that was almost universally panned by critics as an extended piece of sentimental, right-wing agitprop that glorified violence — a potent militia fantasy. Its rejection by “elites” only reinforced the consensus on the right that the left hated America, further enhancing its appeal among conservatives. Milius, who did not respond to a request for comment, had a keen understanding of this dynamic and knew his film would tap into it. The memorial in the final scene, for example, is called “Partisan Rock.” 

“I was the only person in Hollywood who would dare do this movie,” Milius said in bonus commentary he provided for a DVD release of the film. “I knew Hollywood would condemn me, that I would be regarded as a right-wing warmonger from then on.” He had created Red Dawn with an argument in mind. “My obsession is that guns give you a certain degree of freedom, and that our forefathers were very concerned about that freedom, you know, freedom from the government,” Milius told another interviewer. “And that right, once it’s eroded, is the only thing you have, really.”

Whether consciously or not, the NRA tended to mimic the Red Dawn framework in its ads. One in 2015 featured Luttrell, the former Navy SEAL who Mark Wahlberg portrayed in the film Lone Survivor. Looking directly into the camera, Luttrell addresses an “Islamic extremist.” “I will never surrender my rights to your terror,” he says. “I will say what I think, worship according to my beliefs, and raise my children how I see fit. And I defend it all with the Second Amendment to the Constitution to the United States of America.”

The threat of Islamic terrorism had become essential to NRA messaging. For instance, Charlie Daniels, the now-deceased country music star, began another ad by addressing “the Ayatollahs of Iran and every terrorist you enable.” The terrorists were the abstract enemy without. Meanwhile, communists were now the enemy within; they were gun-control activists, or, more broadly, Democrats. In 2018, less than two weeks after the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, Wayne LaPierre addressed an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “On college campuses, The Communist Manifesto is one of the most frequently assigned texts,” he said. LaPierre added that in classrooms across the country the “Constitution is ignored, United States history is perverted, and the Second Amendment freedom in this country is despised.”

The Luttrell and Daniels ads insinuated that it was up to armed civilians to thwart foreign terrorists who threatened to subjugate Americans. But LaPierre’s words portrayed a less abstract, domestic enemy who sought to erase a way of life and leave Americans defenseless. 

Rogers believed — and continues to believe — that it is up to him to stand against pervasive threats and protect the true America. The narrative gives his life a sense of dramatic purpose. “These commies need to be told what’s up,” Rogers wrote at one point to Copeland. At another, in reference to the Democratic Party’s headquarters in Sacramento, he said, “I think I’ll do a drive bye and unload a couple drums into that commie building.”

After he was arrested, in January 2021, Rogers told police he owned a bulletproof vest, “just in case the Chinese invade.” 

One officer asked him, “How do you feel about the way things are going in the country right now?”

“I’m scared,” he said. “Democrats taking control. They got the Senate. I’m worried for my children, I really am.”

“How so?” the officer asked.

“Because it seems like the country is going communist,” he said.

In a letter to me in March, Rogers wrote that Democrats are “modern day members of our 5th column and they are amongst us and causing havoc in our nation.” He added: “They absolutely hate the country and want to transform it into some kind of European socialist utopia. No thanks, that’s not the kind of America I want to live in.”

IAN ROGERS BEGAN AN ONLINE RELATIONSHIP with a woman named Yuliia in 2019. She lived in Ukraine with her young son, and communicated every day with Rogers. “We were endlessly in love with each other and could not wait for the decision of the immigration office so that we could start our family life together,” Yuliia wrote in a letter to the judge on Rogers’ case. Rogers visited her in Ukraine twice, and she got her K-1 visa. Yuliia and her son came to America, and she and Rogers married on Feb. 14, 2020.

Yuliia found her new husband’s home to be a welcoming place. He had a pool and two dogs, and treated her son as if he were his own. She wrote that the boy had “finally found a loving father” who was “very kind to animals and children.” Yuliia said, “We were a big and friendly family.” 

And yet, rather quickly, there were signs Rogers was coming apart. He could not cope with Covid restrictions or contain his anxiety. “I began to notice more and more tension in my husband,” Yuliia wrote. “He was worried that his business would get stuck and stop generating income. He was worried that he would not be able to provide for us and pay the mortgage on the house.”

Stress about money merged with rage over lockdowns, which Rogers projected onto the Democratic leaders who ran his state. “If anything did ‘radicalize’ me it was the Democratic response to the Covid-19 pandemic,” he told me. “‘The government’ did this to impose their will on the people. To see how far they could push us. To see if we would do what they said.”

Rogers’ drinking worsened, and he grew increasingly reckless and unstable. “Ian is a very emotional person and takes everything to heart,” Yuliia wrote. “He is able to say stupid things under the influence of alcohol, but he is ashamed of it when he is sober.”

Social-justice protests and civil unrest had broken out across the country in response to the murder of George Floyd. In August, Rogers texted his former brother-in-law a photograph of his five pipe bombs. “I made these today for when shit hits the fan,” he said. “Civil war is coming.” A few days later, while Rogers was drunk, he and Yuliia had an altercation. According to him, she learned that he had worked on an ex-girlfriend’s car and was upset. He yelled “too loud” in response, and Yuliia ran out of the house with her phone, threatening to call the police. Rogers gave chase, and when he caught up to her, they both tumbled on the concrete. “The neighbors were there, saw the whole thing, and called the cops,” he said. “But it was all a bunch of crap over nothing.”

Rogers was arrested, but the police dropped the charges. He was furious at his neighbors, and decided to sell his house and move an hour south, to a town called Berryessa. In September, he texted Julie Crisci, his ex-wife. “I hate this town I’ll be happier away from the n—–s etc in Berryessa I’ll see beauty every day,” he said, “and I’m sick of my stupid g–k neighbors.” 

Rogers maintains that his texts about his neighbors were uncharacteristic. “In my cellphone I have text messages going all the way back to 2006,” he told me. “All those text messages, going back years and years, and all the police found is two or three racist drunk messages. Overall I’m doing pretty good. I’m not a racist, but sometimes when you’re drunk you might say something stupid. That is what happened here.”

When the 2020 election was called for Biden, it proved to be Rogers’ undoing. He texted Copeland in early December, “Do you think something is wrong with me how I’m excited to attack the democrats?” 

On Jan. 6, Copeland was ecstatic. He texted Rogers “REVOLUTION,” in all caps, three times. “Bro I’m juiced,” he said. “I have my g19 in my hand.” He wanted to “drive around and punish some bitches” and “Drink 4 Red Bull’s and fuck shit up.”

“I hope 45 goes to war if he doesn’t I will,” Rogers texted five days later.

“I’m with you,” Copeland replied.

At some point, a person who is not named in court documents told law enforcement that Rogers was stockpiling weapons, including illegal machine guns. 

“On Jan. 15, 2021,” Rogers told me, “I was arrested and my life ruined.” He went on, “I got railroaded plain and simple.”

WHEN ROGERS WAS TAKEN INTO CUSTODY, he was cuffed in front, and wearing a denim jacket over a camouflage tank top. Police walked him into an interrogation room, where his conversation with two officers was relaxed and polite. Rogers answered questions about his firearms. “I have a lot of guns so I kind of lose track,” he said early on. “I’ve always been a gun nut.” He explained that he made pipe bombs because he enjoyed “blowing stuff up” on camping trips. He referred to himself as a “prepper,” and described his reverence for the military. Rogers said he did not want to be caught off guard in the event that “crap ever hit the fan,” and if it ever did, he kept a “bugout bag” and bulletproof masks. “It’s all on the internet,” he said. “Military stuff is cool because you get really high quality for cheap.”

Rogers approached the subject of his Three Percenter group with a sense of irony. He seemed to suggest an awareness that he was involved in a charade, such as when the Three Percenters gathered online after Jan. 6 and reminded each other to “say something if you hear something.” A “something,” he said, might include the deployment of the National Guard to Sacramento, or the imposition of martial law. “A lot of these guys are just, like, dreaming,” Rogers said, laughing. “We don’t really do much.”

Still, Rogers was confident in his assessment that a conspiracy was afoot. He said the riot at the Capitol was “obviously staged.” He allowed that there were “probably some Trump supporters,” but, he said, “I think there was probably a lot of undercover antifa people.” And even if there weren’t, Rogers insisted, “People have stormed the Capitol building numerous times over the last couple years.”

Rogers’ certainty was rather striking, since the Capitol had not been “stormed” in recent years, and that Jan. 6 — its scale, its brutality, its intent to thwart the passage of power — was a singular event in American history. In fact, the last time the Capitol had been stormed was by the British, during the War of 1812.

Rogers spoke openly during the interview, as if he had little doubt that he was on the right side of history. “There’s a part of me that I wish we would overthrow these Democrats,” Rogers said. “It’s just, to me, there’s so many forces against this nation now. What can one or two guys do? Now maybe if all those guys that stormed the Capitol last week had firearms, maybe they could change things, you know? ’Cause that’s what the Second Amendment’s about.” Rogers rested his head against the wall. “This country,” he said, “is over with, at least the way I grew up it is.” One of the officers asked Rogers if he had planned on hurting anyone, and he replied, “I thought about it,” adding, “I’ve thought about fighting against — fighting back against the government. But like I said, it’s always when I’m inebriated. You wake up and you go, ‘That’s not a good idea.’” Rogers went on, “I don’t want to hurt anybody, you know? I mean, maybe if you could attack the right people.” He laughed in amusement. “But you don’t want to hurt an innocent person. Like people that are really causing problems in this world, like George Soros, you know? It’s kind of satisfying thinking about hurting some scumbag like that. Just because the guy causes so much chaos and misery.”

As the interrogation proceeded, it became apparent that it had never occurred to Rogers that he might be wrong about anything. He was supremely self-assured, unconcerned that he had perhaps been misled and as a result broke the law. Rogers had acknowledged that the Three Percenter activities were a kind of role-playing exercise, but he was also a true believer, and for that reason he struggled to understand that he could be in real trouble, until he was finally told otherwise. Rogers asked, “What’s gonna happen to me?” and when an officer told him he was getting booked at the jail, Rogers, uncomprehending, said, “For what?” The officer referred to his illegal weapons, the possession of which constituted a felony. “Jeez,” Rogers replied.

THE LETTERS WRITTEN BY ROGERS’ family members to the judge after he pleaded guilty were telling, especially one written by his sister Heather. She explained her brother’s downfall the way others might explain a person’s decision to join ISIS. “He was a hardworking blue-collar businessman who created his own financial prosperity and security from our lower middle-class upbringing,” she wrote. “It’s this exact type of person the right-wing news programs and extremist groups prey upon to radicalize.” She called him “a victim himself of these extremist groups recruiting in every corner of the internet.”

Rogers, of course, does not view himself this way; that kind of reinterpretation would be extraordinarily unlikely. The gun industry sells firearm ownership as a political statement against the notion of victimhood, and as a masculine assertion of self-reliance. In this framing, Rogers cannot be susceptible to exploitation without shattering his self-conception, but he can be a casualty of a government that is opposed to freedom. 

It is not clear whether Jarrod Copeland’s perspective still aligns with that of Rogers, since Copeland did not respond to a request for comment. After pleading to an obstruction charge and his role as his friend’s co-conspirator, Copeland received a five-year sentence and was released in May. Rogers, who was sentenced to more time because of his weapons violations, is now pursuing a commutation from President Trump. “I am seeking clemency because I feel I was targeted by the authorities because I am a conservative Republican,” he wrote in his application. “I am a white, Christian, conservative male who proudly was not shy about my beliefs, and I was targeted because of this.”

Trump’s blanket pardons for Jan. 6 rioters — an official sanctioning of partisan political violence — gives Rogers hope, four years into his confinement, that he’ll get out of prison early and restart his life with a clean record. If a pardon comes through, he’d again be legally allowed to own guns. How he would live is an open question. Yuliia has divorced him, and he remains consumed by conspiratorial thoughts. He believes the gun industry, the NRA, the Second Amendment, and Trump stand between America and its ruination. The Democratic Party is waiting in the weeds, preparing to pounce, and impose its will.

Once, larger forces, motivated by their own interests, guided Ian Rogers to vigilantism. Prison has kept outside influences at bay and prevented Rogers from taking the law into his own hands. He says he’s been sober since the day he was arrested, and his attachment to his son appears genuine. Whether that will be enough, when he’s released, to restrain his darkest impulses is a test he will have to face again and again. For now, as before, Rogers gives the world his word — he would never harm another person.