1 month ago
A former US air force survival expert with militia and Christian nationalist connections is running survival and live-fire combat trainings in remote locations throughout the Pacific north-west, boasting on his website that the training incorporates trained law enforcement officers, “church security” operatives, and current and former US military members.
Michael Patrick Caughran’s new training business, American Reconstruction Concepts (ARC) shows organizational and personnel continuities with an earlier organization that explicitly offered “biblical training on war” to young people. That organization, Team Rugged, was directly connected with both a neo-Confederate pastor and a former Washington state legislator who has advocated for Christian nationalism, who a state house investigation found to have participated in “domestic terrorism”.
Meanwhile, Caughran’s recent history as a USAF trainer raises questions about the extent to which his Christian nationalist and survivalist activities overlapped with his enlistment.
Caughran foregrounds his experience as a USAF survival, evasion, resistance and escape (SERE) specialist in advertised training packages. In an introductory video Caughran says the courses are aimed at “first responders and responsible citizens”, with custom trainings for groups of “five or more individuals”.
ARC was incorporated as an LLC by Caughran and Lucas Olson in April 2022 according to Idaho company records. An April 2024 filing indicates that Caughran dissolved the LLC, but at the time of reporting survival courses were still being offered under the ARC name on a company website and various social media platforms.
But this is not Caughran and Olson’s first venture in this field.
The Guardian reported in 2019 on a previous survival and combat training enterprise, Team Rugged, which Caughran and Olson promoted with the help of former Washington state representative Matt Shea.
Team Rugged was publicly advertised as a way for young people to develop “good character and skills to perform in leadership roles”.
In private emails to Shea, however, Caughran wrote that its real purpose was “to provide patriotic and biblical training on war for young men”, and training would include “scenarios where every participant will have to fight against one of the most barbaric enemies that are invading our country, Muslims terrorists [sic]”.
At that time, he also told Shea that the training regime would draw on the work of John Weaver, a pastor and firearms instructor who has long advocated for like-minded Christians to train for battle, and gave firearms training to the neo-Confederate organization the League of the South.
The Guardian contacted USAF public affairs to confirm Caughran’s dates of service but received no response.
ARC offers a range of weapons training, including three courses on hand-to-hand combat, two on edged weapons, on “defensive handgun” and two on “tactical carbine”. These one-day courses run to about $200 per person.
One, a four-day “combat SERE crash course”, promises “to give military members and responsible citizens a foundation in protecting themselves in hostile environments. It includes in-depth physical practicals in areas of defense with and without weapons, wilderness survival, evasion and escape.”
Detailed skills advertised include “knife attacks”, “weapon manipulation”, “handcuff picking” and “tracking/counter tracking”.
The ARC YouTube channel is mostly devoted to advertisements and testimonials for the business, but Caughran has also used it to lend support to far-right causes.
One of these is a May 2024 interview with Rene’ Holaday, a longtime, far-right conspiracy-minded writer, podcaster and activist in north-east Washington, who is currently running for the US Congress. (Holaday’s campaign committee made its initial filing in February 2024 but to date, the FEC has no finance filings from the committee.)
Early in the interview, Caughran said that “we as a veteran-owned business are standing behind her”, and Holaday responded that “we have always been on the same side of things”.
Holaday then cited two self-published books elaborating on conspiracy theories about the United Nations Agenda 21 sustainability programs as the basis of her “expertise” on the international body. Since 1992, when UN members signed the non-binding agreement, far-right conspiracy theorists have characterized it as a “a secret plot to impose a totalitarian world government”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
In the recorded conversation with Caughran, Holaday said “that expertise on the United Nations is going to be critical”, since “a lot of people don’t know that the United Nations is synonymous with communism and the United Nations is also synonymous with the deep state”.
Holaday added: “So when anybody refers to the deep state, it’s actually a reference to the United Nations and their infiltration and takeover of this nation by establishing their own form of foreign governance right over the top of our current existing government.”
With her husband, Jack Robertson, also known as “John Jacob Schmidt” – also interviewed on the ARC YouTube channel with his face concealed – Holaday is co-host of radio show and podcast Radio Free Redoubt, which advocates for rightwingers to carry a “political migration” to the so-called “American Redoubt”.
In 2019, the Guardian reported that Robertson was part of a secret chat on an encrypted messaging service where participants discussed carrying out surveillance, “psyops” and even violent attacks on perceived political enemies. Shea was also a participant in that chat.
Holaday has also been a campaigner for the far-right so-called “Liberty State” movement, which advocates the separation of eastern Washington from the more populous and politically liberal western half of the state.
Separate Guardian reporting in 2019 detailed how Shea, Robertson and Idaho state representative Heather Scott were participants in a chat in which Liberty State was a central topic along with paranoid visions of leftists and Muslims and fantasies of political violence.
Later in 2019, Shea was expelled from the Washington state house’s Republican caucus after an independent investigation found that he had “participated in an act of domestic terrorism against the United States” in supporting the 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur national wildlife refuge, one of “three armed conflicts” he had participated in according to the report.
Shea did not run for re-election in his Spokane Valley district in 2020, and instead became a full-time preacher first at Spokane’s Covenant Ministries, where he also participated in public protests outside the city’s Planned Parenthood clinic. After reportedly breaking with Covenant’s pastor Ken Peters he started his own church, On Fire Ministries, in Spokane Valley.
That church has advertised a “Summer of Harvest” street ministry tour, which Caughran’s wife advertised on her Facebook page, taking in a number of north-east Washington towns including Northport and Colville.
