Interview

When a Fascist Organization Set Up Shop in Their Town, Residents Fought Back

Michael Edison Hayden’s new book tells the story of an Appalachian town’s fight against an anti-immigrant behemoth.

By Shane Burley , 

Truthout

July 27, 2026

An aerial view of the Berkeley Castle on December 8, 2022, in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. Peter Brimelow of the web site VDARE.com is currently the owner of the property.

Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post via Getty Images

There is a certain symmetry to what we have experienced over the past decade of collapsing national consensus and far right radicalization. In cities and small towns around the country, people are watching as their friendships break down along lines of political or moral agreement, and as the shadow of white nationalism towers over even the most seemingly idyllic environments.

This is the conflict that researcher and journalist Michael Edison Hayden found when looking at Berkeley Springs, a small and astoundingly beautiful corner of West Virginia nestled along the edge of Appalachia, where the anti-immigrant group VDARE, a popular far right publication founded in 1999 that mixed edgy Republicans like Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter with explicit white nationalists, decided to purchase a literal castle to use as its home base. What happened next was a clash between residents and some of the most vocal and best-funded white supremacists in the country, and Hayden was pulled directly into that story as he stood with the town’s residents and faced personal and emotional catastrophe along with them.

This story is woven through his new book, Strange People on the Hill, a mix of deep reporting and painfully honest memoir that tells the story of people trying to survive alongside the increasing strangeness of the communities where we once felt at home.

I spoke with Hayden about what drove this project, how it evolved, the activism Berkeley Springs residents took up, and what this all means for a far right that has unmatched power in Donald Trump’s second term.

Shane Burley: We get a lot of books each year about the growth of the American far right, but yours was different. What brought you to the uniquely personal approach you took, and how did it change along the way?

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Michael Edison Hayden: I tried to do something different. We’ve been writing about this era for a long time, and I wanted to do something that would center the psychological conditions of the moment more than necessarily the bad guys doing it. I wanted to focus on what it’s like to live in this time where everybody is so obsessed with the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, and how crazy it’s making people.

When Bold Type [Books] approached me about doing a book, I thought it would be an opportunity to help further distinguish the difference between the town and VDARE by showing what it had done to Berkeley Springs, lifting up the town’s story and showing that the area is worth saving. I didn’t want to leave my work with the town unfinished.

But then it changed a lot when I ran into all those issues with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), where I worked, because I couldn’t actually write the book without dealing with what had happened there. [After being terminated from the SPLC, Hayden threatened a discrimination lawsuit. The organization ultimately settled.] I happened to be in Berkeley Springs in December 2023 when I dealt with suicidal ideation, which stemmed not only from the hell of reporting on this material but also what happened at the SPLC … union-breaking tactics and discrimination. One of the more important events in the town at that moment was me coming there to speak to people, so I couldn’t keep myself out of the story.

The book deal was all I had when I went into a psychiatric hospital, because I’d lost my job, I’d lost everything. So I was working on the book while I was hospitalized. I wrote and rewrote the first lines of the book through a lot of difficulties like memory loss from medication and the changing environments as I went through treatment.

For me, the story shows that everybody is going through a tremendous loss of sanity because of the era we’re in. If you look at things like those execution-style shootings in Minneapolis and how quickly people on the MAGA right rushed to defend it without getting any more information, we’re really going crazy.

I wanted to capture that feeling, that we are all going through this horrible thing together.

You land in this small town of Berkeley Springs in Appalachia, a tourist enclave that is now essentially being threatened by a white nationalist institution setting up shop. Tell me a bit about this town, and how these community members started trying to build a plan to push VDARE back out of their neighborhood. This is something that is likely familiar to a lot of people. Over the past 10 years, many folks without any history as activists have been forced into situations where they have to rapidly become community organizers.

The most defining thing is there are not a lot of people from Appalachia living in Berkeley Springs. It is a town full of people who came from somewhere else. It’s an affordable place for people who like nature, so it brings people from all over, especially retirees. This is part of what leads it to be economically defined by tourism, people who make a living selling knickknacks or coffee, and their market is the visitors who come to town.

It’s an interesting question whether or not the main characters of the book consider themselves activists. There’s that anti-fascist motto, “we protect us.” This is something really primal for people. None of these people were really into radical leftist politics. For the most part, they’re liberals who embodied the “we protect us” mindset by necessity, not as some sort of deeply ideological political stance.

This was more like, wait, we’re all screwed. All our businesses — this is how we make money. Then this person comes in, they have radical anti-immigrant beliefs, and they’re about to become the most famous and possibly wealthiest people in town. What do you do about that?

So they came together as business owners in the beginning to try to solve a problem that had no obvious solution. Peter and Lydia Brimelow bought their castle privately. It’s their property. So how do you even fix that?

From there, they end up becoming activists. They hadn’t thought in those terms before, but I think they would probably look back and say that they were.

Peter Brimelow had been incredibly influential on the anti-immigrant right, and in the creation of the “alt-right” and the radicalization of people like Ann Coulter and Stephen Miller (which you’ve written about). But what was his significance at the point in which he arrived in the town?

At the time Peter Brimelow purchased the castle in 2020, I think he believed this was the start of a VDARE dynasty. This organization he built would radiate outward from this castle beyond his death and become an institution for nativists and, if you would like, fascists.

But they ran into a huge problem. After Charlottesville, there was a growth of activists who worked to institute social punishment and accountability for what was witnessed there. That meant calling people’s jobs, calling people in the towns where they grew up and saying, “Did you know this happened?” One of the most important ways was to call people hosting [fascist] events and ask if they want something like what happened in Charlottesville to happen here, too.

That’s what happened to VDARE when they tried to set up conferences. VDARE lost access to multiple hotels due to this type of activism. Peter and Lydia believed they found an answer by purchasing the castle. This can finally be a home base where the “dissident right” can gather.

What he didn’t understand was that when he signed off on that castle purchase, that was the end of VDARE.

He had previously been at the height of his influence. You had Stephen Miller in the White House, somebody who looked up to Peter Brimelow. You had people listening to Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter, both VDARE contributors.

Peter was at peak influence, and I think ultimately, to use a cliché, they flew too close to the sun.

The people they were bringing into the movement didn’t always have the same kind of snobby Brimelow manners, like Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler or Kevin DeAnna, who had even more explicit interest in neo-Nazi politics than Brimelow. In the same way that the younger generation of the MAGA movement is more wild and reckless, the same thing was true of the type of people VDARE was cultivating. Then financial troubles followed, as did New York State investigations into this nonprofit status. Things crumbled quickly.

We watch as the residents begin a kind of desperate attempt to organize the town against Brimelow, but fractures start forming. This is also quite familiar for people whose relationships were, perhaps before Trump and the alt-right, primarily apolitical, but who now experience sharp barriers forming between them. How do they change during this process?

I think it’s something that everybody who has engaged in any kind of political activism understands.

In our most naive, childlike state, when we first take political action, we may assume everyone knows what we are doing is right, and then you’re surprised to find that not everybody agrees. And that opposition can even come from ostensibly liberal allies who simply don’t agree with speaking out. Once you start speaking up about life and struggle, there will be blowback.

That’s what happens to most of the people in Berkeley Springs. That includes both people who made a stand defending VDARE and people who stood up against it. I don’t defend VDARE supporters in any way when I’m saying this. I’m just saying that anybody who spoke up about anything was met with either antagonism from people who believed the opposite, or from a crowd of people who wanted everybody to just shut up and not disrupt the apple cart.

In the case of Trey and Paul — two of the book’s main characters, whose coffee shop is at the center of the story — they had people who were ostensibly liberal and with them ideologically, but who really went off trying to undercut them and make them look foolish. Multiple people accused Trey of bringing journalists, outsiders, to Berkeley Springs to spark bad press. These are people who may have agreed with them and been against VDARE but couldn’t rationalize the significance of the situation and just wanted everybody to stop talking about it.

We watch as they throw everything at the wall, with limited results. This is an experience that I think resonates particularly across rural communities that have tried to scrape together strategies with few resources and a lack of uniform political support. What did they learn from this experience, and what lessons do you think this offers to all of us thinking about how to mobilize our communities during a time of far right government capture?

I think everybody in town is eager to move on and put the VDARE years behind them. It’s like you finally broke up with your shitty ex, but her stuff is all over your house. They know VDARE is gone and doesn’t have the kind of presence it used to have, but the castle is still owned by Peter and Lydia Brimelow, and they are still in town.

I think the townspeople who opposed VDARE in Berkeley Springs are surprised and impressed with themselves to a degree, and I think they also know that there is no total victory for them.

As for what everybody else can learn, I’ve given that a lot of thought. The thing to do — and it’s a difficult thing — is that when you see something that is wrong, it doesn’t matter if it seems impossible. You need to speak up and do something about it.

Berkeley Springs had an impossible situation. VDARE bought that castle with a fountain of dark money. The town had no access to funds by comparison. When you’re stuck with a situation that seems impossible, but you know it’s wrong, you still have to speak up. They tried everything, and they were able to find wiggle room and dislodge VDARE.

One thing that’s not in the book (I only found out afterward) is that people from the town were calling New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who ultimately opened the crushing investigation into VDARE’s nonprofit, and trying to get her to pay attention to what was happening in Berkeley Springs. Even sending my articles to her.

They tried everything. On the day of a VDARE conference at the castle, they hosted a pro-immigration event in town. There were a bunch of different flags from different countries, a bunch of cookies, and maybe five people. But there was enough to have a pro-immigration sign visible in the town.

Whose mind was changed that day? We don’t know. You just don’t know.

In order to live, you need to act. That is the lesson from their activism. The easiest thing to do is try to get your money together and move away. Say it’s a lost cause.

And they didn’t do that.

The center of the U.S. far right movement seems to be shifting away from fascist organizations and into posts of formal political power. We see as, to a degree, white nationalist organizations have shrunk, but that may correlate with how well those ideas have percolated into the mainstream GOP. So where does the heart of the U.S. far right sit today?

They don’t need groups anymore. If you want to be a Proud Boy or you want to be in the Patriot Front, why wouldn’t you just join ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]?

There’s no way to statistically quantify how many people who have been in groups like that, or have been attracted to groups like that, are in ICE. But there’s an opportunity to get paid for it. And when you look at the propaganda that comes out of the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] Twitter account and all these things, there’s just no reason for some of these organizations anymore. It’s nominally a neo-fascist collective with cryptocurrency schemes, setting up UFC fights.

There’s no need for these fringe white nationalist organizations anymore, necessarily. We’ve seen the Daily Stormer’s editor Andrew Anglin hanging it up, for example. The MAGA movement has peaked. Now the question is: What will the movement do now that it has ascended and become such a dominant cultural force?

We don’t need to worry about whether MAGA is a fascist movement. Of course it is. After January 6, after Minneapolis, it’s a fascist movement.

The question is: What will they do going forward?

Will they succeed in taking some sort of autocratic hold on the country, a grip on a weakened democracy? We don’t know yet. We don’t know if they have the savvy to govern purely as an authoritarian movement. Right now, we have authoritarian moments and symbols and events overlaid onto something that still resembles the United States we knew before Trump.

I think right now we’re going to find out whether this very fascist movement is able to dominate in the way we know they want to.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Shane Burley

Shane Burley is the author of Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse (AK Press, 2021) and Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It (AK Press, 2017). His work has appeared in places such as NBC News, Jacobin, Al Jazeera, The Baffler, The Daily Beast, Truthout, In These Times and Protean. He is currently working on an anthology of anti-fascist writing called ¡No pasarán! and writing a book on antisemitism. Follow him on Twitter: @shane_burley1.

Pride and Proximity in Berlin

Adrienne Teitcher

 July 29, 2026

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Last weekend, I was sitting by the river, talking to a stranger about how our proximity to others, physical or sociological, determines the extent to which we experience them as fully alive, and also to mourn their deaths. It was twilight in the suburbs of Berlin; the quiet of this warm night air broken now and again by the party boats cruising by.

To illustrate my point, I said, “God forbid a bomb should go off in a café in Berlin. A few deaths would make headlines across Germany and all over the West, because we are—or feel ourselves to be—close to those who died. But if an apartment block in Beirut is leveled by an Israeli missile, it gets a single paragraph in the news, and then we all move on.” I felt a superstitious chill upon uttering these words.

That was around 10 p.m. Later, I would learn that this was the precise time someone drove a van into marchers attending the Christopher Street Day parade–the mainstream Pride event in Berlin–and then, after smashing into a tree, began stabbing those nearby.

Devastating.

This morning, after processing the attack with friends and fielding calls from distant family, I did something without even realizing: I turned the page on the carnage. I sat at my desk and I got back to work on a documentary I’m pursuing about the lie of denazification.

It was only when I messaged a friend about filming dates that I realized I was quite out of sync with those around me. She wrote back and said she was reeling from the attack and unable to talk right. And suddenly, I felt insensitive, reptilian even—cold.

So I had to ask myself: What was wrong with me? How could I already be back at my desk, catching up on work? Then I remembered: that’s exactly what I’ve been doing every single day for the past two and a half years at least, since Israel escalated its genocide against the Palestinians.

No one deserves to die because they chose to go out into the streets and affirm that their life has value—that they refused to be silenced or forced to hide who they are, by law, hate or violence. This is what Pride means to me.

Yet, just as no one deserves to die at a Pride march, no one deserves to die because they live in an apartment building selected seemingly at random by IDF high command, on the pretense that they shared their domestic space with “the enemy”.

Likewise, no one deserves to be turned into red mist because they’re sheltering in a tent in Gaza or Beirut when Israeli artillery drops.

120 schoolgirls do not deserve to die screaming in their school auditorium in Minab, Iran, in the opening act of the USA’s latest imperialist adventure.

A patient, lying in bed at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza, does not deserve to be set on fire when Israel carries out an air strike on a space that should be a safe haven.

None of these people deserved to die.

Yet time and again, after each slaughter was blotted out by yet another slaughter—even with the firebombing of the Al-Aqsa Hospital, the image of a shell of a person in a bed, seemingly shifting and rotating their stiffened body amid the raging flames—I just moved on.

As I sit at my desk, watching the footage once again, I wonder: Was this person alive? Or was it simply the force of the heat from the explosion caused by the Israeli airstrike that made their body move as if they were?

I feel sick, I physically recoil, as part of my mind tries to merge with the experience of this person, tries to imagine what it would mean to have your skin burn away and still somehow be conscious.

And yet, even after this gruesome exercise, I will move on. I know I will. This is what I do. And this is what disgusts me about myself.

I can only live this so-called life—go to work, pay taxes, dance, treat myself to a coffee, breathe the air, tell a joke, wonder if I should put grapes in my salad this evening—by pushing these memories away and welcoming the numb detachment that separates the functionally “normal” from the insane.

When did I decide that I wanted to be normal?

Pride exists because queer people—trans, lesbian, gay, intersex—have not always been seen as fully human. Yet when I look at the scores of daily deaths of brown people in the so-called Middle East, at the indifference to suffering when it occurs on bodies coded as “Muslim” or “Arab,” I see that the dehumanization runs far deeper for these communities than the violence and threats I experience as a trans woman in Berlin.

In the midst of this rising tide of imperial violence, Pride has lost its meaning. Proud of what? What is the goal? To assimilate into a nation state that exports deadly bombs to a warzone? And are we supposed to somehow take succor from the fact that the murderers who helm the German regime are willing to light the candles of us sexual deviants in this, our dark night?

Pride draws the lens of our awareness into a small, proximate circle—those around us, those who look like us, who think alike—and at best struggles to achieve access to an unjust power, while failing to speak to those killed or forced into unlivable lives by a bloodthirsty empire and its many, many tentacles.

I can’t think clearly anymore. I can’t feel freely. Because to feel the burden of these cruel days would mean to stop—completely—any exertion of energy, any movement within a single fiber of my being, unless that spark is an act of resistance to a world that normalizes the humiliation, degradation, herding, and slaughter of those whose lives are deemed to not matter.

Adrienne Teitcher is a trans artist based in Berlin.

'Project much?' Mockery as Stephen Miller rants about 'losers and crazies' on Fox News

Robert Davis
July 27, 2026

RAW STORY

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller delivers remarks, as he and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attend a presentation ceremony of the Mexican Border Defense Medal (MBDM) to service members participating in the Trump administration's Operation Ardent Vanguard, at the Pentagon in Washinton, D.C., U.S., July 27, 2026. 

REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein


One of President Donald Trump's top aides was ridiculed on Monday after he went on Fox News to rant about "losers and crazies" in the Democratic Party.

Stephen Miller, Trump's deputy chief of staff for policy, joined Sean Hannity on his eponymous show on Monday to discuss the upcoming midterm elections. During the interview, Miller took a swipe at some of the most popular Democrats in the party, one that didn't land well with some people in the audience.

"The names you mentioned — AOC, Bernie, [Ilhan] Omar—these are people who, even 10 or 15 years ago, would have been relegated to the outermost fringes. They are now the heart and soul of the party," Miller said. "The Democrats have become the party of freaks, weirdos, losers, and crazies," Miller said. "But you can't laugh it off because it's deadly serious."

Miller's comments were swiftly mocked online.

"Project much? Ten years ago, Miller was a fringe staff member for a fringe senator. Now he’s in the White House," Ray Locker, a journalist and author, posted on X.

"10 or 15 years ago we would have rightly condemned Stephen Miller's policy of turning away persecuted Christians who were brown while welcoming only white South African refugees as a Nazi idea," Jaid Jilani, author of "The American Saga" on Substack, posted on X.

"The king of the 'freaks, weirdos, losers, and crazies' party wants to call out some of the most popular politicians in the country," Hemant Mehta, a "Jeopardy!" champion, posted on X.

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Trump's 'white-supremacist wonderland' about to face 'humiliating implosion': analyst

Kathleen Culliton
July 26, 2026 

RAW STORY


White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller looks on as he stands behind reporters during a press conference with U.S. President Donald Trump, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, and U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 15, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

The Trump's administration's efforts to turn the world into a "a white-supremacist wonderland" will suffer a "humiliating implosion" for one darkly funny reason, a Salon columnist argued Sunday.

Executive editor Andrew O’Hehir skewered the fragile egos of many a MAGA minion in his lengthy editorial on President Donald Trump's failed foreign policy which he asserted was doomed by a fatal flaw.

"We should be grateful for the epic and reckless corruption of this administration," wrote O'Herir. "Ambitious schemes to reshape America and the world as a white-supremacist wonderland are consistently undercut by the enormous levels of graft."

Yes, graft.

O'Herir's argument for this claim centers on Trump's White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, a man he compares to one of Adolf Hitler's most devoted followers among the Nazis.

"As I see him," he wrote, "Miller is a true believer whose corruption is moral rather than financial, one of many traits he appears to share with Joseph Goebbels."

This moral corruption stands in stark contrast to the rest of the Trump administration whose financial corruption he argues have effectively undermined Miller's goals.

Why? O'Herir predicts Trump's grafts have delivered a fatal blow to his popularity, and the MAGA movement is headed for a nasty midterm surprise.

"As the Trump administration veers unsteadily into its lame-duck phase and a likely midterm wipeout, its quest for a legacy achievement becomes increasingly pathetic," he wrote.

"Meanwhile, the search for something that can be pitched to last-ditch MAGA loyalists as a victory, no matter how petty and insignificant, continues."

Despite O'Herir's assertion that the humor of the situation is marred by the horrific consequences — "this might be amusing if real human lives weren’t at stake, and if billions in taxpayer dollars appropriated by Congress for aid to impoverished countries like Mali weren’t being diverted to right-wing nationalists, white supremacists and anti-LGBTQ groups" — O'Herir concludes with one last dark silver lining

Wrote O'Herir: "Trump’s return to power has, at the very least, finally confounded all the doofuses who ever took anything he said at face value."

Silence before the storm in northeast India

By Maharnav Bhuyan

Published 26 July, 2026

There is a particular quality to silence in Upper Assam. It is not the absence of sound: the tea gardens still hum with sickle and static radio, the Brahmaputra still drags its brown weight past Sadiya and Dibrugarh, the Bihu drums have not stopped. It is the absence of incident. For a decade now, the districts that once bled under the shadow of the 28th Battalion (Tinsukia, Sivasagar, Golaghat) have known something close to peace. Militancy, we are told, is a memory. United Liberation Front of Asom — Independent (ULFA-I) is a rump. Its commander has not set foot in his own camps for ten years. The story Assam tells itself is one of insurgency exhausted into irrelevance.

But look east, past the tea estates and the last Assam Rifles checkpoint, into the hills where the state’s writ has never fully reached, and the picture complicates. Myanmar is disintegrating in slow motion. Opium is being cultivated at a scale unseen in a decade. Drones sourced in Kyiv and Warsaw are surfacing in the hands of ethnic armies fighting a junta that no longer controls a fifth of its own country. Foreign nationals with opaque biographies are being intercepted along footpaths on India’s borders with unsettling regularity. And a wartime supply road, closed for eighty years, is suddenly being discussed in Delhi’s strategic circles again, not out of nostalgia but because of what lies buried in the hills it crosses.

None of these threads, on its own, proves very much. Together, they describe a region rearming itself in the dark. This is an attempt to lay them side by side.

The vacuum that made ULFA

To understand why the current moment matters, it helps to remember what happened the last time Myanmar’s north came apart.

The ULFA was born in 1979 out of a genuine and still-unresolved grievance: the sense among Assamese youth that the state’s oil, tea and land wealth flowed outward while unemployment and unchecked migration hollowed out the province from within. But grievance alone does not build a guerrilla army. What transformed ULFA from a students’ union offshoot into one of South Asia’s most capable insurgencies was geography, specifically the porosity of the hills separating Assam from a Myanmar that, through the 1980s, was itself fracturing into ethnic fiefdoms beyond Rangoon's control.

Suppressing insurgency in Assam became an essential element of India’s later “Look East” policy precisely because that insurgency had, from its infancy, been sustained by cross-border sanctuary. ULFA cadres trained with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the Naga underground; camps proliferated across the Indo-Myanmar-Bangladesh-Bhutan quadrilateral faster than any single government could dismantle them. The 28th Battalion, the “Kashmir Camp,” was the most lethal expression of that sanctuary system: a force of more than 500 cadres headquartered not in Assam but deep inside eastern Myanmar, funded by extortion, armed with AK-56s and RPGs, and answerable to a leadership that could retreat across a border the Indian state could not follow.

That entire architecture depended on one condition: that the borderlands of northern Myanmar remain lawless enough to host it, and porous enough to supply it. For 20 years, counter-insurgency operations (Bhutan’s 2003 Operation All Clear, sustained Indian Army pressure, Bangladesh’s post-2009 crackdown under the Awami League) steadily closed those sanctuaries, one by one. By the 2020s, ULFA-I had been reduced to a shadow of the 28th Battalion’s era: a few hundred cadres, an ageing and largely absentee commander-in-chief, and a recruitment base that, by the account of a 2025 defector, no longer even receives ideological instruction.

Which is precisely why what is happening in Myanmar right now should concern anyone who has read this history before.

Myanmar’s second collapse

Five years after the 2021 coup, the Myanmar junta controls barely a fifth of the country’s territory, with more than 5 million people displaced and more than fifteen thousand killed in 2025 alone. The prospect of a unified resistance briefly flickered when the Three Brotherhood Alliance’s Operation 1027 tore through northern Shan State in 2023. But by 2025, Chinese pressure had forced the return of captured territory, and in March 2026 the alliance effectively fractured when the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) turned its guns on its former ally the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), seizing the border town of Kutkai in a move analysts read as a realignment toward Beijing.

What has emerged from that fracture is not junta victory but a checkerboard of competing sovereignties. A new coalition, the Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union — bringing together the Chin National Front, the KIA, the Karen National Union and the Karenni National Progressive Party with the exiled National Unity Government — was announced in March 2026 as an attempt to unify a resistance that had spent years speaking in “two or three voices.” Meanwhile the junta, unable to win outright, has turned to intensified aerial bombing of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and schools, in a strategy of attrition against the population it cannot govern.

This is, in almost every structural sense, a repeat of the conditions that birthed the 28th Battalion: a weak or absent central authority, ethnic militaries controlling long stretches of the India-facing border, and a war economy that rewards anyone who can move men, money, or matériel through the hills. The difference is scale, and the difference is drones.

The road of ghosts, a haunting trail from World War II

There is a single stretch of asphalt, half-swallowed by jungle for eighty years, that captures this shift better than any troop map — the Stilwell Road. It was built by dying men: US engineers and conscripted labourers hacking through malarial hill country at a rate the US Army itself called the toughest assignment it ever handed its engineers. It has spent most of the decades since as a ghost road, remembered mostly through crashed wartime aircraft still occasionally surfacing from the undergrowth of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and northern Myanmar. That a corridor built to move armies against Japan should now be stirring back to life as a route for rare earths, insurgents and unmarked convoys is the kind of historical irony this region seems condemned to repeat.

Built between 1942–45 under General Joseph Stilwell to resupply Chiang Kai-shek’s forces against Japan, the 1736-kilometre road ran from Ledo in Assam, through Myanmar’s Kachin and Sagaing regions, into China’s Yunnan province. The Indo-Myanmar stretch has been disused since the war ended, and for decades New Delhi kept it that way deliberately: the presence of ethnic insurgents along the route, and the fear that reopening it would simply widen the pipeline for drugs and small arms into the northeast, made the road a strategic liability rather than an asset. As recently as the 2010s, Indian military planners explicitly warned that opening the road “can be adversely used against us during any war with China.”

That calculus is now being revisited, not for trade in the abstract but for what northern Myanmar is sitting on. India has begun holding talks with the KIA, which controls the terrain, over access to rare-earth deposits, including dysprosium and terbium, minerals essential to EV motors, precision munitions, and satellite systems, a trade currently dominated by China. In other words: the same collapse of central authority that makes the road dangerous is what makes it, for the first time in eighty years, accessible: accessible to Indian officials courting the KIA, accessible to Chinese trade networks realigning with the MNDAA, and, by the same physics of an unpatrolled border, accessible to whoever else wants to move through it unseen.

A road that reopens because a state has collapsed is not a peace dividend. It is a symptom.

Golden Triangle and the Manipur conflict

The clearest evidence of what an ungoverned Myanmar produces is agricultural. The United Nation’s 2025 opium survey found that poppy cultivation in Myanmar expanded 17% from the previous year to 53,100 hectares, the largest area under cultivation since 2015, cementing the country’s position, in the wake of the Taliban’s opium ban in Afghanistan, as the world’s leading illicit opium source. The price of a kilogram of raw opium has more than doubled since 2019, rising from $145 to $329, a market signal that draws exactly the kind of capital that fuelled ULFA’s own extortion-and-arms economy a generation ago.

The correlation between conflict and cultivation is not coincidental. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s regional representative has directly linked the intensification of fighting in Shan and other border states to farmers’ return to poppy as one of the few reliable livelihoods left to them. A 2023 UNODC assessment also found indications of substantial opium cultivation in Sagaing, directly along Myanmar’s frontier with India. Shan State’s opiate economy has historically bled sideways into northeast India’s own insurgent financing networks; there is no structural reason to assume that a larger opium economy next door produces a smaller one here.

That money finds a ready market in a region already the most heavily armed in India. Assam and its neighbouring states have always sat at an anomaly in India’s gun-control landscape: even under India’s generally restrictive licensing regime, the northeastern states show markedly higher rates of licensed firearm ownership than most of the country, a pattern rooted in border security concerns, rural land-protection traditions and decades of insurgency. Licensed guns are only the visible fraction of the region’s actual arsenal.

Manipur has spent the past three years demonstrating what the invisible fraction looks like once civil order breaks down entirely. Since ethnic violence erupted in May 2023, roughly 6000 weapons have been looted from police armouries and gun shops by militants on both sides of the conflict, of which only a fraction have been recovered. Nearly a third of the weapons in militant hands were found to be more sophisticated than anything in the state’s own armoury, including assault rifles such as M16s and M4A1 carbines sourced from outside official channels entirely. Manipur is not an isolated ethnic crisis sealed off from the wider northeast; it is a live demonstration of how quickly a state’s monopoly on force can collapse once it slips, and of how readily an under-policed, opium-adjacent frontier supplies the weapons to fill the gap. Layer a resurgent Golden Triangle arms-and-drugs corridor onto a region already holding this concentration of both licensed and looted weapons, and the phrase “civilian rearmament” stops being metaphorical.

Mysterious foreigners

Everything laid out above — the collapsing junta, the record poppy harvest, the reopening ghost road, the looted armouries of Manipur — is scaffolding. It exists to answer one question: why should a handful of border arrests matter at all? The answer lies in timing and geography, and in both, this moment rhymes uncomfortably with the one that produced ULFA in the first place.

Recall the sequence from the 1980s: Myanmar’s north slipping out of Rangoon’s control, ethnic armies consolidating territory along the frontier and, arriving into that vacuum almost precisely as it opened, foreign trainers, arms brokers and sympathetic intermediaries who furnished a fledgling insurgency with tradecraft it did not yet possess. ULFA did not invent guerrilla warfare on its own; it was taught, in camps across a border nobody was watching closely enough. The insurgency that became the 28th Battalion was, in its infancy, a beneficiary of exactly the kind of externally supplied expertise that a lawless borderland makes possible.

Set that history beside what has surfaced in the past four months.

The drone network: On March 13, India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested US citizen Matthew Aaron VanDyke (founder of a Washington-based security consultancy that has provided training to non-state fighters in Libya and Ukraine), alongside six Ukrainian nationals at airports in Kolkata, Delhi and Lucknow. The NIA alleges the group entered India on tourist visas, travelled into Mizoram, a Protected Area Permit zone barred to foreign travellers, then crossed into Myanmar without authorisation, where they trained ethnic armed groups and smuggled a large consignment of drones sourced from Europe. This is not an allegation of tourism gone wrong. It is a documented, charge-sheeted case of foreign nationals entering India’s most restricted frontier specifically to deliver modern combat capability to armed groups on the other side.

Investigative reporting has traced the consequences: sources allege one shipment of drones brought down a Myanmar military aircraft, while Kachin rebels separately used drones to damage an ATR-72 at Myitkyina airport in February. In a detail that underlines how contested this borderland has become for outside powers and not just insurgents, Indian authorities were reportedly tipped off to the group’s movements by Russian intelligence, itself monitoring the network amid the wider geopolitical fallout of the Ukraine war. Whatever the full truth of the network’s backers, the operational fact is undisputed: foreign nationals with combat-training expertise used India’s northeast as a transit corridor into a conflict zone, and the ethnic armies they trained are described by the NIA’s own filing as having links to insurgent organisations inside India.

The Nepal border incidents: In July 2026, two more unexplained figures surfaced along a different but equally porous frontier, and, in the retelling, briefly merged into one story they were not. Jordan Brown, a 36-year-old Californian claiming six years’ service in the US Navy and Special Forces, was intercepted by the Sashastra Seema Bal roughly 35 metres inside Indian territory attempting to cross into Nepal near Sonauli. He was carrying no passport, visa or identification, with two mobile phones he had reportedly damaged himself, and whose account of how he entered India has shifted with each retelling, with his claimed military background still unverified by Indian agencies.

Days earlier and roughly 350 kilometres away in Bihar’s East Champaran district, Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) personnel separately arrested Ukrainian national Oksana Shevtsova attempting an identical crossing, after discovering her visa had expired in 2022. On the available facts, an unrelated overstay case, folded into the same “foreign agents” narrative online only because the nationality and the border happened to match. It is worth being precise about that distinction rather than letting the two blur, as they did on social media within hours of the arrests.

Here, then, is the pattern worth sitting with, not a proven conspiracy, which the public record does not support, but a recurrence of conditions. A remote frontier, at the periphery of Indian authority and in the underbelly of Chinese influence, is once again drawing men who move without passports, without a consistent story, and without any plausible tourist’s reason to be near a border crossing. One such case has already been proven, under oath, to involve foreign combat trainers arming ethnic militias with links into India’s own insurgent networks. The others remain unresolved. But the 1980s taught this region what happens when unexplained foreigners start arriving in its remotest hills at the exact moment those hills stop being governed by anyone. It is seldom nothing.

Why ‘silence before the storm’

Here is the genuinely uncomfortable part: ULFA-I itself is not what it was. Its commander-in-chief has not visited his own Myanmar camps in over a decade and is reportedly based in China; ideological training of new recruits has largely ceased; and morale within its remaining bases has collapsed following a series of drone strikes on its Sagaing headquarters. By every conventional metric, the organisation that ran the 28th Battalion is dying.

But an insurgency dying of organisational rot is not the same as a region returning to peace: it is a vacancy. The 1980s taught Assam that vacancies of exactly this kind get filled, and filled quickly, by whoever can supply arms, sanctuary and cash fastest across an unwatched border. What has changed since the 1980s is the sophistication of what is on offer: not just AK-56s smuggled from Kachin armouries, but European-made attack drones capable of downing aircraft; not a slow trickle of opium revenue, but a decade-high poppy economy worth up to two billion dollars; not a handful of foreign trainers slipping in on forged papers, but documented mercenary networks with the operational reach to train ethnic militaries in modern warfare.

Assam is not currently at war. That is the honest, unglamorous truth beneath the alarm. But the ingredients that produced its last war — a collapsing neighbour, an unregulated arms and opium economy, and foreign actors moving unsupervised through its border hills — are all present, in a more advanced form. Whether that adds up to storm or false alarm is not yet knowable. It is, at minimum, no longer a silence worth mistaking for peace.

Maharnav Bhuyan is currently reading for an Executive MA in Strategic Communication Management at Monash University, Australia. He is the principal author of Midnight's Oeuvre and Fabricated Communicative Immortality and is a former journalist and columnist from Assam. 

This piece draws on open-source reporting current as of July 2026. Several elements, particularly the VanDyke network investigation and the status of ULFA-I's remaining Myanmar camps, remain active, contested and subject to revision as agencies release further findings.