He volunteered for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign that year. He married a fellow libertarian, started a family, and hung out a shingle as a lawyer in Montana-“Ivy League quality … without Ivy League expense,” read a classified ad in 2008. He went on to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where he graduated summa cum laude, and then to Yale Law School, where he won a prize for a paper arguing that the Bush administration’s enemy-combatant doctrine violated the Constitution. The brush with death inspired him, at 28, to enroll in community college. In 1993, he dropped a loaded handgun and it shot him in the face, blinding him in his left eye. After his discharge, he worked as a firearms instructor and parked cars as a valet. Rhodes had joined the military just out of high school, hoping to become a Green Beret, but his career was cut short when he fractured his spine during a parachute training jump.
“Our would-be slave masters are greatly underestimating the resolve and military capability of the people,” Rhodes wrote. “The greatest threats to our liberty do not come from without,” Rhodes wrote online, “but from within.” Republicans had spent eight years amassing power in an executive branch now occupied by Barack Obama. It was a moment of anxiety on the American right: As the Great Recession raged, protesters met the new president with accusations of socialism and tyranny. Rhodes was a little-known libertarian blogger when he launched the Oath Keepers in early 2009. She’d received a leaked database with information about the group, and she said it might contain some answers. I’d been asking a version of these questions since 2017, when I met a researcher from the Southern Poverty Law Center who told me about Rhodes and the Oath Keepers. How much worse would things get if trained professionals took up arms? was already seeing a surge in political violence, and in August the FBI put out a bulletin that warned of a possible escalation heading into the election. What would happen, I wondered, if Trump lost, said the election had been stolen, and refused to concede? Or the flip side: What if he won and his opponents poured into the streets in protest? The U.S. They saw all of it as a precursor to the 2020 election.Īs Trump spent the year warning about voter fraud, the Oath Keepers were listening. Many of their worst fears had been realized in quick succession: government lockdowns, riots, a movement to abolish police, and leftist groups arming themselves and seizing part of a city. “Civil war is here, right now,” he wrote, before being banned from the platform for inciting violence.īy then, I’d spent months interviewing current and former Oath Keepers, attempting to determine whether they would really take part in violence. And when a Trump supporter was killed later that week in Portland, Oregon, Rhodes declared that there was no going back. In August, when a teenager was charged with shooting and killing two people at protests over police brutality in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Rhodes called him “a Hero, a Patriot” on Twitter.
Over the summer, Rhodes’s warnings of conflict only grew louder. He had put out a call for his followers to protect the country against what he was calling an “insurrection.” The unrest, he told me, was the latest attempt to undermine Donald Trump. And whereas Rhodes had once cast himself as a revolutionary in waiting, he now saw his role as defending the president. Rhodes had been talking about civil war since he founded the Oath Keepers, in 2009. With him in his pickup were a pistol and a dusty black hat with the gold logo of the Oath Keepers, a militant group that has drawn in thousands of people from the military and law-enforcement communities. Rhodes, 55, is a stocky man with a gray buzz cut, a wardrobe of tactical-casual attire, and a black eye patch. To hear more feature stories, get the Audm iPhone app.
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