The Red Legs sought border war-inspired bloodshed, officials say. Let’s not repeat that history.
A larger-than-life John Brown dominates John Steuart Curry's 1942 mural, "Tragic Prelude," at the Kansas Statehouse at Topeka. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
Last month 25-year-old Lake Ethan Roberts stood at the edge of a rock quarry near Richmond, Missouri, and lit the fuse of a crude explosive device of his own design, according to federal authorities.
Then he tossed it in the quarry.
The device was made from a plastic single-serving “shooter” bottle filled with black powder, a fuse threaded through a hole in the aluminum cap, and had steel BBs wrapped around it with duct tape, recounts a federal affidavit.
The device exploded with a presumably satisfying bang, injuring no one but proving the design. The quarry was 25 miles east of Kansas City, Missouri, where Roberts lived.
Roberts tossed a second device, which also exploded. Then Roberts walked down into the quarry and gathered up the pieces, one of which had only partially detonated, its duct-taped BBs still clinging to the plastic. He said, according to the affidavit, that he might be able to improve the design by using a glass bottle instead of plastic.
With Roberts at the quarry were two other individuals.
One was 31-year-old Jarred G. Gilliam of Kansas City, Kansas, an emergency department nurse at the University of Kansas Medical Center who the document said had been experimenting with Molotov cocktails. Roberts and Gilliam were part of a Kansas City-area anti-government group that called themselves the Red Legs and communicated via Signal, an encrypted messaging service.
The other individual present was a paid, undercover FBI informant, who provided most of the information in a 16-page affidavit used to support federal charges against Roberts and Gilliam.
Early this month, Roberts and Gilliam were charged in separate federal cases with felony possession of unregistered destructive devices. If convicted, each faces up to 10 years in prison.
The Red Legs are a “violent extremist group,” according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Kansas. The group “promotes committing violent attacks on government agencies and the military” and its proposed targets included U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and facilities, the Missouri National Guard, and political groups.
Lisa Nouri, the defense attorney for Roberts, declined an email invitation to comment on the charges. An attorney representing Gilliam did not respond to an email inquiry.
Much of my career as a journalist has been spent covering violent anti-government extremist groups, from Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh to the Aryan Republican Army to God’s Misfits, accused of killing two Kansas women in 2024. The common thread among those extremists was their violent right-wing beliefs. I was curious about the Red Legs case because federal officials allege the group is motivated by violent left-wing views — and because their name evokes the bloody history of the years preceding the Civil War along the Missouri-Kansas border.
The Red Legs were the most notorious of the Kansas free-state guerrilla units. A secretive organization of a few hundred men, they were commanded by abolitionist Charles R. “Doc” Jennison. They enforced vigilante law and were known as much for their thievery as their ruthlessness. In September 1861, they participated in the sacking of Osceola, Missouri. The town was burned and looted and 200 enslaved persons were freed. The name of the unit came from the red leggings the guerrillas wore.
The Red Legs were closely aligned but separate from James H. Lane’s “jayhawkers,” a loose-knit guerrilla unit that also helped itself to property and terrorized the pro-slavery faction on the border. For more than a century, the Jayhawk has been the mascot of the University of Kansas at Lawrence.
The affidavit makes clear the connection between the anti-government group that Roberts and Gilliam are accused of belonging to and the historical namesake.
“We need the Red Legs as the official community defense group and the Jayhawkers for other activities,” one member said to another on Signal. Another message said that “once the civil war is here the Red Legs will act as a sabotage and reconnaissance group.”
The chats cited in the affidavits are snippets of conversation, without showing the full context, but there are many references to weapons, tactics, targets and comparisons to groups such as the Irish Republican Army.
The FBI was tipped off to the Red Legs by a detective with the Kansas City Police Department. In 2020, the detective was monitoring social media of an individual suspected of vandalizing police headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri.
Following the May 25, 2020, murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis, many cities were rocked by civil unrest. In Kansas City, protestors threw fireworks and defaced a memorial to fallen police officers while police used tear gas and other types of force.
The Kansas City detective joined a Signal chat for the Midwest Youth Liberation Front in 2022. You may recognize the name of the group, because in 2021 Kansas Reflector’s Sherman Smith reported how a teenage member of the anti-fascist group exposed a candidate for the Haven school board as a Proud Boys member and a white nationalist.
From the youth organization, according to the affidavit, the detective learned of the Red Legs. In 2023, the detective requested, and was granted, access to the group’s Facebook Messenger chat, and later was added to the encrypted Signal chat, along with 11 others.
“As developed in this investigation,” an FBI special agent declared in court documents, “the Red Legs Signal chat contained conversations and rhetoric that promoted violence against entities such as ICE. Subjects discussed ambushing ICE agents, acquiring military weapons by attacking military trains, acquiring explosives, and numerous other plans for violence. Around June 2025, the (detective) sent this information to FBI KC.”
Roberts, according to the affidavit, suggested on the Signal chat a plan was needed for “decisive action” against ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. He said the group needed to start slowly, perhaps with “basic sabotage,” practice with firearms at a shooting range at Parkville, Missouri, and find a way to hit key infrastructure. He said he liked the idea of dropping “cocktails” from drones.
“It wouldn’t make sense to panic now, the time for panicking has long passed,” Roberts said in a group chat, according to the affidavit. “Now we must make our peace, arm ourselves, and prepare to do what is necessary.”
He also urges the group to make a plan if the MAMDANI Act passes.
What’s the MAMDANI Act?
It’s proposed legislation that would, among other things, deport any naturalized U.S. citizens who are communists, socialists, members of an Islamic fundamentalist party or those who advocate for such groups. It was introduced in April by U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, and is a throwback to the worst days of McCarthyism. The bill has little chance of advancing, as it would be unconstitutional, but is notable for its xenophobia. The title stands for “Measures Against Marxism’s Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists Act,” but the name is also a dig at New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, a naturalized citizen and a democratic socialist.
It’s disturbing that an FBI special agent would cite opposition to proposed legislation as supposed evidence in support of the destructive device charge. Roberts is quoted in the Signal chat as saying, “We need to see how many of us need rifles and plates.” Plates refers to body armor. Nowhere in the sworn document is evidence that Roberts planned to target a specific politician or attack a particular site based on the MAMDANI Act. Instead, the emphasis is on defending the community.
This is an important distinction.
He may have been paranoid in thinking that passage of the act would move the country a little closer to civil war, and his belief that rifles and body armor would be necessary may be extreme, but that reaction is not unlawful. Perhaps the agent was simply trying to be thorough, but the insertion of the official name of the act seems like a partisan dog whistle.
Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk last year, the Department of Justice has increasingly targeted left-wing activists. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Sept. 22, 2025, designating “antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization. In March, in the first case of its kind, nine individuals labeled “North Texas Antifa cell operatives” were convicted of terror-related charges in the July 2025 assault of an ICE detention facility at Prairieland, Texas.
The problem is that antifa —short for “anti-fascist” — is not an organized moment, but a loose collection of individuals engaged in the kinds of protests that date back to 1920s Italy and Nazi Germany.
Recently I spoke by phone with Mark Bray, the author “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.” An American academic, Bray and his family moved to Madrid last year after receiving death threats.
“No. 1, (antifa) is not an organization,” Bray told me. “You know, I compare it to socialism. There are socialist groups, but socialism itself is not a group. There are antifa groups, but antifa itself is not a group. There are different ways to parse it, but it’s something you describe yourself as or maybe something you do.”
The Trump administration, Bray said, has attempted to liken antifa to the Weather Underground or other underground leftwing groups of the 1960s and 1970s, but the comparison doesn’t hold. In 1975, the Weather Underground bombed the State Department in Washington, D.C. Examples of modern antifa activism include street resistance in Seattle, Occupy Wall Street, and the ICE protests in Minneapolis.
The affidavit in the Red Legs case doesn’t mention antifa, and neither Roberts nor Gilliam are charged with anything other than the possession of destructive devices.
If the affidavit is true, much of what Roberts said on Signal is more than enough to warrant the attention of federal authorities. Discussing acts of political violence and making devices to carry out that violence should be abhorrent to all those who value our democracy. Roberts, and other members of the Red Legs, are quoted as wanting to “execute” federal agents they deemed guilty. At one point, an unidentified member is quoted as saying ICE agents and government officials “need to be dragged from their beds and shot or hacked the same way they were during Nat Turner and John Brown’s time.”
If genuine, this is a chilling glimpse into an extremist group.
It reminds me of the hateful rhetoric spewed by the Crusaders, the three Kansas men convicted of plotting to blow up an apartment complex housing Somali immigrants in 2016. The Crusaders were on the opposite end of the political spectrum, but the disregard for human life and the thirst for violent retribution is the same.
While the black-powder-and-BB contraptions in this case seem amateurish, the court documents cite an opinion from the FBI Laboratory Explosives Unit that if properly assembled, they were improvised explosive devices capable of causing property damage, injury, or death. They met the technical requirements for destructive devices, according to the lab, and were subject to regulation by the ATF.
Gilliam is charged with violating the same regulation by possessing three Molotov cocktails made of glass bottles, cloth wicks, and evidence of gasoline. On June 3, agents said they found the devices in a search of an outbuilding at Gilliam’s home. There was only the odor of gasoline in the bottles when agents found them.
“Gilliam states he had dumped them out,” the affidavit said. “He had made one and threw it, and thought, he didn’t need those just sitting here. He had dumped them all out into a bucket.”
Gilliam reportedly told agents he had no intent to use them.
A Molotov cocktail is an improvised weapon, made famous by resistance fighters during World War II. Its name is derisive of Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who declared that the incendiary bombings of Finland in the winter of 1939 were “airborne humanitarian food deliveries.”
Gilliam, a nurse at KU Medical Center in Kansas City, allegedly claimed on Signal that he had removed a Flock automatic license plate reader camera from the medical center campus. The Red Legs, according to the affidavit, targeted Flock cameras “in furtherance of anti-government ideology.”
Gilliam is being held pending a detention hearing July 6. He has been assigned a federal public defender.
Roberts is being held without bond pending trial.
“While defendant Roberts has no criminal history,” noted U.S. Magistrate Judge Lajuana M. Counts, “allegations made in the Affidavit in support of the Criminal Complaint are very troubling to the Court.”
His release, Counts ruled after a detention hearing, would pose a danger to the community.
The cases against Roberts and Gilliam deserve watching attention in our current political climate. The bright line federal authorities must not cross is to trample freedom of speech, however distasteful, in the name of justice.
On June 16, the Justice Department charged 15 anti-ICE protestors with federal crimes that ranged from conspiracy to destruction of public property to multiple accounts of assault on federal officers. All are members of Direct Action Minnesota (DAMN), according to the indictment, and communicated with other members of the group over Signal.
The story of the Red Legs is another chapter in the civil unrest that has rocked this country since 2020, a reminder of the political violence that roiled the border before the Civil War, and an indicator of our deepening divisions. We don’t know all of the story yet — neither Roberts nor Gilliam have had a chance to present a defense — and both are by law presumed innocent until proven guilty. I am interested to learn how a nurse who works at an urban emergency department and has seen the effects of violence firsthand might justify advocating violent actions against the government and its agents.
Calls for violence from the extreme left must be relegated to the same category as the toxic rhetoric from the far right — they must not only be denounced, but damned as morally reprehensible.
The killings of Floyd by a police officer, and of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents, all in Minneapolis, are American tragedies. So too would be the assault or murder of federal officers in their names.
There is much to be done to make America, in its 250th year, live up to the promise of its founding. But political change must be effected with votes, not with violence. To do otherwise is to surrender the nation to the rule of beasts, and not of law.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.