THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE OATH KEEPERS: How Stewart Rhodes went from denouncing authoritarianism to urging an authoritarian crackdown.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: IDEAS

ON JANUARY 13, 2022, the FBI arrested Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes for his alleged role in last year's riot at the U.S. Capitol. According to the charging documents, Rhodes and other Oath Keepers formed a "quick reaction force" ready to "rapidly transport firearms and other weapons into Washington, D.C., in support of operations aimed at using force to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power." He and 10 other defendants have been charged with seditious conspiracy and several other offenses, ranging from assault to evidence tampering.

Their plotting was inept, and the plan went nowhere. While several Oath Keepers did storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, they left their guns behind; the so-called quick reaction force appears to have stayed at the hotel. The whole operation, in the words of Reason's Jacob Sullum, amounted to "a sideshow in a much broader spasm of vandalism and violence that was itself utterly futile."

But even as an unrealized fantasy, those hotheaded plans contrast sharply with Rhodes' original pitch for his organization.

When the Oath Keepers were launched in 2009, the group's central idea was simple and direct: It urged cops and soldiers to remember their oath to uphold the Constitution, and to lay down their arms if ordered to violate Americans' rights. To that end, the group circulated a list of commands its members would not obey. Some of these hypothetical orders ("to detain American citizens as 'unlawful enemy combatants'") were more plausible than others ("to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people"). But in each case, the upshot wasn't violent revolt; it was nonviolent refusal.

If you squint, you might spot a trace or two of those ideas in Rhodes' post-election scheming. (In one chat message cited in the charging documents, he pointed to the largely unarmed Bulldozer Revolution against Slobodan Milosevic as a model.) But his thinking had clearly taken a turn toward violence. Rhodes reportedly said after the election that if Joe Biden took office, a "massively bloody revolution" would be in order. In another message quoted in the indictment, sent two and a half weeks before the riot, an alleged conspirator who said he had just spoken with Rhodes reported that "the time for peaceful protest is over in his eyes."

This isn't the first time a group's purpose has evolved radically. Just ask any historian of the 1960s to compare what Students for a Democratic...