By Anthony McCann
The Daily Beast
August 31, 2019
As December wore on, more denizens of Ammon’s and Ryan’s patriot’s FaceWorld were trickling into the county. Some of these folks were of considerably different temperament than mild-mannered Ammon. Jon Ritzheimer was one of the more widely known and more troubling of these newcomers.
Before coming to Burns, the young Iraq War veteran had ended up on the national news for leading an armed protest outside a Muslim community center in his home state of Arizona. At the rally he’d sported a fuck islam shirt, the principal product of his online business, Rogue Infidel. In the coming months he’d recant on the shirts and claim, in emotional videos posted to the internet, to regret the whole thing. It wasn’t that he’d mellowed, exactly; around the same time he’d also been making threats to personally arrest a Michigan senator who’d supported the Iran nuclear deal, an act he promised to follow up with more arrests, including a citizen’s arrest of the president if necessary.