Sedition dossier: Stewart Rhodes

The Oath Keepers founder and leader has been a figure in the far-right 'Patriot' movement since 2009. His 18-year sentence for seditionist conspiracy on Jan. 6 may be pardoned by Trump.

Stewart Rhodes in Berkeley on April 15, 2017. (David Neiwert photo)

The four most prominent Jan. 6 insurrectionists likely to be pardoned by Donald Trump are all leading figures in the seditionist “Patriot” and street-brawling outfits that invaded the Capitol that day: Stewart Rhodes (Oath Keepers), and Joe Biggs, Ethan Nordean, and Enrique Tarrio (Proud Boys).

Of these four, Rhodes has by far the most extensive resume on the radical right. The Oath Keepers date back to the early stages of the Tea Party, with whom they were closely associated. The organization revolves almost entirely around Rhodes and always has.

From the outset in 2009, I identified the Oath Keepers as one of the most potentially lethal and dangerous far-right organizations because it recruited law enforcement and military personnel, with the purpose of radicalizing them into far-right conspiracism:

This is an example of why I've called the Iraq War "the Timothy McVeigh Finishing School": Inevitably, there are going to be competent killers either joining the far right from our military ranks—especially if they've been recruited into those beliefs either before or during their service—or enacting far-right "lone wolf scenarios," and they are going to have the ability to wreak a great deal of havoc.

... Remember, too, that there have already been concerns raised about concerns raised then by the FBI hold true in this situation as well:

Military experience—ranging from failure at basic training to success in special operations forces—is found throughout the white supremacist extremist movement. FBI reporting indicates extremist leaders have historically favored recruiting active and former military personnel for their knowledge of firearms, explosives, and tactical skills and their access to weapons and intelligence in preparation for an anticipated war against the federal government, Jews, and people of color.

The prestige which the extremist movement bestows upon members with military experience grants them the potential for influence beyond their numbers. Most extremist groups have some members with military experience, and those with military experience often hold positions of authority within the groups to which they belong.

Military experience—often regardless of its length or type—distinguishes one within the extremist movement. While those with military backgrounds constitute a small percentage of white supremacist extremists, FBI investigations indicate they frequently have higher profiles within the movement, including recruitment and leadership roles.

I had been watching this infiltration of military ranks with growing alarm for some time even before the Oath Keepers emerged:

This problem doesn’t involve only the Nazis, gang-bangers, and other violent personalities worming their way into the military. It also affects the many more formerly normal, non-racist recruits who have been dragged into multiple tours of duty in Iraq, regardless of the psychological dangers of such treatment. This includes many people whose evaluations have recommended they not be returned for duty but have been sent back regardless. …

This has the deadly potential to become a significant component of the predictable surge in far-right activity likely to manifest itself in the United States in the coming months and years, especially as Democrats and liberals expand their hold on power. We run the risk of re-creating the conditions that arose in Germany and Italy after World War I: the presence of scores of angry, disaffected, and psychologically damaged war veterans, fed a steady diet of "Dolchstosslegende," poised to organize into a political force aimed at "rebirthing" the nation and its heritage.

The Oath Keeper who first caught my attention was a former Marine named Charles Dyer, who started posting videos as “July4Patriot” in 2009 warning that an armed revolution was coming. He was the first extremist I saw wearing a skull mask to disguise his features.

Dyer became a leading spokesman for the Oath Keepers, traveling the country and expounding on the paranoid “10 Orders We Will Not Obey” to Tea Party audiences. It all ended suddenly when he was arrested and convicted for molesting his young daughter.

By then, the group’s founder, Elmer Stewart Rhodes—a Yale Law graduate who had previously worked in Rep. Ron Paul’s congressional offices, marinating in the conspiracism Paul promoted—had become a regular fixture at right-wing gatherings from the Tea Party to CPAC to the NRA.

Rhodes was fond of claiming that the government’s martial-law actions in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina was all the reason he needed to be paranoid about the possibility that gun owners would be rounded up and incarcerated. He explained it on Fox News to Bill O’Reilly.

The best in-depth report on the Oath Keepers in that era came from Justine Sharrock at Mother Jones, who spent time among their ranks and came away with a deeply worrying article:

There are scores of patriot groups, but what makes Oath Keepers unique is that its core membership consists of men and women in uniform, including soldiers, police, and veterans. At regular ceremonies in every state, members reaffirm their official oaths of service, pledging to protect the Constitution—but then they go a step further, vowing to disobey "unconstitutional" orders from what they view as an increasingly tyrannical government.

Here are those “orders”:

1. We will NOT obey any order to disarm the American people.

2. We will NOT obey orders to conduct warrantless searches of the American people.

3. We will NOT obey orders to detain American citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants” or to subject them to military tribunal.

4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a “state of emergency” on a state.

5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty.

6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.

7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.

8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to “keep the peace” or to “maintain control."

9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies.

10. We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

Rhodes was eager to portray this core of the Oath Keepers' creeds as involving merely ordinary rights that everyone naturally would stand up for, and in a way, that's true. But only deeply paranoid people would believe there was any reason to be concerned that these rights violations might be imminent.

The Oath Keepers kept working the Tea Party gatheriings even as they lost steam after 2012. They raised their national profile in April 2014 when they formed a prominent presence in the crowd of “Patriots” who turned up in Bunkerville, Nevada, to loudly support rancher Cliven Bundy in his armed showdown with federal authorities.

Stewart Rhodes at the Bundy Ranch in April 2014.

Rhodes especially took a leading role after the scene nearly erupted in gunfire on April 13, which was the zenith of activity at Bundyville. After that, every faction retreated to the camp and began ratcheting up the anger and rhetoric, as well as the paranoia. Wild rumors about an imminent drone attack by the government set all these factions on edge, with Rhodes trying to placate everyone and keep a lid on things. At one point, a militia faction and Oath Keepers drew weapons on each other.

Eventually that scene dissipated. But it was wildly successful in attracting fresh recruits. So the next spring of 2015, Rhodes and his compatriots cooked up a scheme for another armed standoff with the federal government, this time near Grants Pass, Oregon.

Since the potential dispute was really concocted out of nothing, the standoff never really came to be—though not before Oath Keepers had threatened the locals and made an ugly scene. They ran around with their hair on fire one day after hearing rumors of a helicopter.

It too petered out after a few weeks. They made one more stab at fomenting an armed standoff, this time in Lincoln, Montana, during the middle of a bad forest-fire season. That too went nowhere, as it became clear that locals had no wish to brandish guns at the Forest Service rangers who were keeping them safe in their homes.

Rhodes showed a predilection to try to piggyback onto stories from Fox News for his causes. That fall, fueled by stories claiming Obama was ignoring security at military recruiting stations, Oath Keepers started showing up for guard patrols outside local offices.

We got another taste, a la Charles Dyer, of the level of responsibility Rhodes and his organization were willing to shoulder during that episode: When a participant in one of the patrols in Ohio dropped his gun and it fired off a round into the pavement, Rhodes immediately disavowed him: “Thankfully, not one of ours,” he said in an article posted to the group’s website. “Good intentions on the part of volunteers are not enough, because we all know where the road paved with them leads.”

This underscored a reality about all of these “citizen militias” since the time they had begun forming in the 1990s: For all their hifalutin rhetoric about being concerned with protecting citizens and their rights, they have always been accountable to exactly no one, and do not recognize any civil authority besides their local sheriffs (and even those only marginally). If people are harmed by their activities, there is no person or entity who will shoulder the civic responsibility. “Well regulated” they are decidedly not.

Finally, in January 2016, Patriots found themselves in another armed standoff, this time at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon, led by Cliven Bundy’s son Ammon. It lasted nearly a month and cost one Patriot his life. Rhodes mostly kept his distance (and was widely criticized on the far right for it).

The next time I encountered Rhodes was in April 2017 in Berkeley, California, when he turned up as a speaker at the very first Proud Boys event, a “free speech” protest that attracted a large number of violent white nationalists and neo-Nazis.

He was also a speaker a couple of months later at a similar attempt to whip up violence under the rubric of “free speech,” this time in Portland. At this event, Proud Boys dominated the scene and the Patriot militiamen mostly receded to the background—though one of them was observed apparently assisting local police officers in detaining an antifascist protester.

Rhodes tried to keep up with the street-brawling gangs like the Proud Boys. He announced specialized training for “Spartan” warriors to enable them to take the fight to the streets. He claimed the “violent left” was preparing an insurrection to take down Donald Trump.

The Oath Keepers became a travesty of everything they espoused: they claimed to be “patriots” while openly espousing sedition and government overthrow, and claimed to be intent on “preventing a dictatorship” while serving as handmaidens to Trump:

"The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here," Rhodes said. "My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can’t do it without them.

"We say if the American people decide it’s time for a revolution, we’ll fight with you."

When Trump suggested on Twitter that civil war might erupt if he were impeached, Rhodes chimed in: “We ARE on the verge of a HOT civil war. Like in 1859. That’s where we are.”

Rhodes began posting essays urging Trump to invoke the insurrection act during the summer of 2020. When a Patriot marcher was shot and killed in Portland in late August, he demanded Trump act: “The first shot has been fired brother. Civil war is here, right now. We'll give Trump one last chance to declare this a Marxist insurrection & suppress it as his duty demands. If he fails to do HIS duty, we will do OURS.”

He really wanted the shooting to serve as a pretext for a nationwide callup of all militiamen to engage in a roundup of “Antifa.” Rhodes went on:

This was a terror attack, on US soil, by a member of an international terrorist organization—Antifa. And the terrorist gunman’s Antifa comrades celebrated the murder and continue to plan more of the same. President Trump must declare there to be a Marxist insurrection. And he needs to declare that Marxist insurrection to be nationwide, carried out by both Antifa and BLM, with the goal of terrorizing Americans into submission in furtherance of their attempt to overthrow our Constitution, as they plainly state is their goal.

As it happened, U.S. marshals instead hunted down the gunman and summarily executed him in the street, as Trump had demanded they do. The president later boasted: “We sent in the U.S. Marshals, it took 15 minutes and it was over, 15 minutes and it was over ... They knew who he was, they didn’t want to arrest him, and 15 minutes that ended.”

The Oath Keepers were temporarily mollified. But in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, Rhodes’ rhetoric bordered on the hysterical, especially after Trump lost the election. Rhodes, of course, believed the election had been stolen by the “Communists.” On Alex Jones’ Infowars show on Nov. 10, he claimed: “We have men already stationed as a nuclear option in case they attempt to remove the president illegally. We will step in and stop it.”

On Jan. 4, Rhodes posted a callout on the Oath Keepers website:

It is CRITICAL that all patriots who can be in DC get to DC to stand tall in support of President Trump's fight to defeat the enemies foreign and domestic who are attempting a coup, through the massive vote fraud and related attacks on our Republic. We Oath Keepers are both honor-bound and eager to be there in strength to do our part.

All this led to Rhodes playing a key role in the Jan. 6 events. He not only organized a weapons cache just outside the D.C. city limits to be called into action, but also organized a “stack” maneuver up the Capitol steps, while he himself remained outside the building.

It took nearly a year, but Rhodes was eventually charged with seditious conspiracy. Rhodes had been claiming that the Oath Keepers in the stack had “gone off mission.” He added: “If we actually intended to take over the Capitol, we’d have taken it, and we’d have brought guns.”

Rhodes’ ex-wife, Tasha Adams, helped peel back the curtain on his con-man act a bit by coming forward to describe her abusive and often bizarre marriage. We learned how he lost his eye (he shot it out by accident) and why he wears an eyepatch now (it’s gross).

When Rhodes was finally found guilty and sentenced to 18 years in federal detention. There was an obvious trail connecting Rhodes to Trump via Roger Stone. The Garland DOJ apparently chose not to follow it, possibly for lack of evidence.

Trump has indicated he will make exceptions to his promise to pardon the insurrectionists, particularly if they were violent. It’s unlikely Rhodes will be an exception. But his record underscores the many sound reasons he is now behind bars—and should stay there.