By Amelie Thomson-Deveaux and Maggie Koerth @ FiveThirtyEight.com, Sept. 4

[....] For the purposes of this article, when we refer to the militia movement, we are referring to an umbrella term that encompasses paramilitary activists and groups with strong anti-government leanings. But beyond that, modern militias are hard to explain and categorize — what even counts as a militia is up for debate. One thing is for sure: There is no one militia — not in Kenosha that night and not anywhere in the country. Instead, experts say, “the militia” is really a multifaceted movement with fluid boundaries. The key to understanding that movement’s role in the chaos of 2020 is knowing just how difficult it can be to pin down what apparent militia members believe — much less how they’re connected to each other and the broader movement.

[....]Even the organized, club-like militias don’t ascribe to a single overarching ideology, which makes it especially difficult to figure out what motivates individuals like Rittenhouse, or even how to describe them. “It’s almost like people are choosing their own adventure,” said Oren Segal, vice president of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League.

So a crowd like the one that showed up in Kenosha can be made up of individuals, even strangers, with little connecting them except a shared interest in gun rights and a sense that they’re the only ones who can protect their community. And in these trying times — amid a pandemic and protests against racial injustice, plus a president who is giving them more public support than they’ve ever had from the national political establishment — those individuals are taking a collective turn in a direction that, experts fear, is likely to result in more violence [....]