A resident of Warwick in Bucks County, Theodore Kosin, is the central figure in an enlightening story in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Kosin, now 33, had been casting about for a sense of purpose and camaraderie after serving two tours in Afghanistan. Then he saw a recruiting video on YouTube for the “Three Percenters Originals,” a Pennsylvania branch of the countrywide fanatical militia that has outposts as far away as the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota and even in Canada.
The Three Percenters combine survivalist training, militia tactics, conspiratorial thinking and rightward political orientation. A typical militia, in other words, that thinks anyone carrying a gun must be right.
The story points out that there is a through-line from the army to the militia to oppositions to masks, another form of tyranny. In other words, that same sense of mission that makes men and woman feel they have a purpose in life.
[Note: Kosin is registered to vote in Bucks County as a Republican, and in September applied to fill the seat in the Ninth Region on the Central Bucks School Board, when John Gamble resigned. He attends school board meetings, where he says it should be up to the students to decide if they want to wear masks, and said it was time to return to pre-pandemic conditions.
In September he was one of six applicants to fill the Region 9 seat on the Central Bucks Board of Education when John Gamble resigned. He is no longer a member of the Three Percenters.]
