YOU’LL OFTEN HEAR HARD-CORE right-wing Trumpists refer to themselves as “patriots.” Repeatedly. Donald Trump himself regularly refers to his devoted followers the same way. And because the word has a common, generic meaning, most of us glance over its use without giving it much attention.
We shouldn’t, because the word is a kind of code, a signal of team membership. Certainly, its use has an obvious propaganda purpose: if Trump’s supporters are “patriots,” then his opponents by right-wing logic must be unpatriotic and un-American. But more importantly, identifying as one signals to others your affiliation with the far-right Patriot movement—better known to some as the militia movement or “constitutionalists.” And understanding this is central to understanding that this movement is the nexus of the right’s insurgent war on democracy.
“Patriot” has become the word that far-right ideologues, including various pundits and politicians, and their army of followers use to identify one another. “Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for us as patriots to stand up,” admonished Republican Senate candidate J. D. Vance in calling for support for the young shooter who had killed two protesters in Wisconsin.[1] Tucker Carlson titled his pseudo-documentary promoting a conspiracy theory that “the left” is now persecuting conservatives “Patriot Purge.”[2] The January 6 insurrectionists arrested called the section in the D.C. detention facility where they were held the “Patriot Wing.”[3]
The insurrectionists’ use of the name “Patriots,” however, is not simply the generic one suggesting people with a deep love of American democracy. In reality, you’ve never met a more seditionist lot; well before the attack on the Capitol, it was common for them to speak among themselves of overthrowing the government and “the globalists” and preparing for civil war. Their notions of patriotism revolve around enforcing authoritarian adherence to “legitimate” leadership figures and not around the democratic values of our historical traditions.
In psychological terms, it’s an expression of a deep need to see oneself, and to be seen by others, as heroic. The dynamics of achieving that heroic status inform everything they do and say, particularly their constant reification of concocted enemies against which they set out to do battle. In the 1990s, the threat was the “New World Order” and its black helicopters; in the 2000s, it became an invading horde of immigrants, combined with the threat of Islamist terror; under Trump, it became “Antifa” and Black Lives Matter and critical race theory.
In practical terms, it is also an identification with the far-right conspiracist “Patriot” movement that, for the past thirty years, has been organizing so-called “citizen militias,” as well as violent “sovereign citizen” extremists, border-watching Minutemen vigilantes, armed Three Percent gun fanatics, and, more recently, street-brawling Proud Boys—all of them built around an alternative far-right universe composed of conspiracy theories.
While the “Patriot” movement has been typically described over the decades since it began organizing in the 1990s by researchers who have monitored it as “antigovernment,” that term may not give the most accurate sense of their ideology. Given that many of them deny they are opposed to government—they in fact believe government would be just fine if they were in charge, as they believed they were under Donald Trump; they simply oppose any kind of liberal democratic government—and that many of them are unmistakable in their hostility to democratic principles and democracy itself, it is more fundamentally an antidemocratic movement.
Their hostility to democracy is reflected in one of the movement’s embedded truisms: “America is a republic, not a democracy”—which is, as historian George Thomas explained in detail in The Atlantic, not just an ahistorically wrong claim, it’s dangerously toxic:
When founding thinkers such as James Madison spoke of democracy, they were usually referring to direct democracy, what Madison frequently labeled “pure” democracy. Madison made the distinction between a republic and a direct democracy exquisitely clear in “Federalist No. 14”: “In a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, will be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.” Both a democracy and a republic were popular forms of government: Each drew its legitimacy from the people and depended on rule by the people. The crucial difference was that a republic relied on representation, while in a “pure” democracy, the people represented themselves…
American constitutional design can best be understood as an effort to establish a sober form of democracy. It did so by embracing representation, the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the protection of individual rights—all concepts that were unknown in the ancient world where democracy had earned its poor reputation.[4]
As Thomas notes, no less an authority than Alexander Hamilton, one of the Federalist Papers’ chief coauthors, argued for popular government and called it democracy: “A representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable.”
None of this matters to “constitutionalist” Patriots, particularly not the people who turned out to protest the outcome of the 2020 election. The trope—which was popularized by the far-right conspiracist John Birch Society in the 1960s—is deeply embedded in their belief system, which is founded on a narrative that the current American government has been overthrown by a nefarious cabal. Birch Society founder Robert Welch set the table in a 1961 speech in which he claimed that in a democracy, “there is a centralization of governmental power in a simple majority. And that, visibly, is the system of government which the enemies of our republic are seeking to impose on us today.”[5]
That narrative has remained a cornerstone of the far right in the succeeding decades, particularly among the constitutionalist crowd. In a 2020 interview, “constitutional” police chief Loren Culp—the long-shot Republican nominee for the governor’s seat in Washington state—asserted that “democracy is mob rule” and that “famous Chinese leaders like Mao Zedong and Mikhail Gorbachev loved democracy because democracy is a step toward socialism, which is a step towards communism.”[6]
Similarly, Utah Senator Mike Lee, a devoted Trumpist, insisted in 2020 that “we’re not a democracy,” adding that “democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are.” As Zack Beauchamp explained at Vox:
The idea that majority rule is intrinsically oppressive is necessarily an embrace of anti-democracy: an argument that an enlightened few, meaning Republican supporters, should be able to make decisions for the rest of us. If the election is close, and Trump makes a serious play to steal it, Lee’s “we’re not a democracy” argument provides a ready-made justification for tactics that amount to a kind of legal coup.[7]
Which is exactly what proceeded to happen on January 6.
WHILE THE PATRIOT MOVEMENT has often been considered synonymous with the militia movement of the 1990s, it really is more of an umbrella term encompassing a range of far-right extremists. In the post-alt-right era, it has been adopted for identification by an even broader range of ideological warriors, including the Alex Jones Infowars crowd and the Proud Boys.
The Anti-Defamation League defines the Patriot movement thus: “A collective term used to describe a set of related extremist movements and groups in the United States whose ideologies center on anti-government conspiracy theories. The most important segments of the ‘Patriot’ movement include the militia movement, the sovereign citizen movement and the tax protest movement. Though each submovement has its own beliefs and concerns, they share a conviction that part or all of the government has been infiltrated and subverted by a malignant conspiracy and is no longer legitimate.”[8]
The use of the name originated with right-wing extremists in the mid-1980s who called themselves Christian Patriots, and were unabashedly racist—many of its participants could be found at annual Aryan congresses assembled by the Christian Identity Aryan Nations near Hayden Lake, Idaho. This movement was studied in depth by sociologist James Aho in his 1990 book, The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism.[9] Derived in many regards from the openly racist and anti-Semitic Posse Comitatus belief system, Christian Patriots also claimed that ordinary people could declare themselves “sovereign citizens” to free themselves from rule by the federal government (including paying taxes), and that the county sheriff was the supreme law of the land, able to countermand federal law if they deemed it unconstitutional. Civil rights laws, public land ownership, a federal education department—these were all considered null and void in their world of radical anti-federalism.
Following the tragic outcomes of the armed federal standoffs at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in 1993, an idea that had been circulating in far-right circles for several years—a strategy called “leaderless resistance” that called for forming small, action-directed “cells,” along with violent acts of “lone wolf” domestic terrorism—became the consensus response among Christian Patriots.[10] They called them militias—a reference intended to invoke the wording of the Second Amendment to justify their existence.
Moreover, to broaden their appeal to more secular-minded recruits, the movement dropped “Christian” and began calling itself simply the “Patriot movement.” The name stuck permanently.
At the time he blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, Timothy McVeigh self-identified as a “Patriot,” as did Eric Rudolph, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics backpack bomber. The Montana Freemen—purveyors of “sovereign citizen” pseudo-legal scams and major figures in the Patriot movement—engaged the FBI in an eighty-one-day armed standoff near Jordan, Montana, in 1996.
Despite the connection to public violence, however, the Patriot movement—as I explained in my 1999 book In God’s Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest—decisively repackaged their ideas and agendas.[11] The general idea was to strip their overt bigotry (especially the innate anti-Semitism and racism) from their radical localist and nativist politics and to present them wrapped in American-flag bunting and lofty-sounding “constitutionalist” rhetoric that disguised its utterly nonsensical nature with heavy doses of jingoist jargon.
Throughout the 1990s, the Patriots continually organized their vigilante paramilitaries as militia groups and preached the “constitutionalist” approach to government to anyone who would listen, along with their never-ending web of “New World Order” conspiracy theories, peddling maps of “FEMA concentration camps” and sightings of “UN black helicopters.” The conspiracism reached a fever pitch in 1999 over the supposed looming “Y2K apocalypse,” but after that proved to be a non-event, it then receded into a low-level hiatus during most of the early 2000s, with conspiracists mostly devoted to the massive speculation industry that sprang out of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Among the leaders of that industry was radio host Alex Jones, a onetime John Birch Society member who began his career in Texas regurgitating conspiracy theories originally concocted by the Militia of Montana and other “Patriots,” then packaging them for mass consumption.[12] Shortly after the embarrassment of having hysterically hyped the Y2K apocalypse, Jones seized on the 9/11 attacks as a fresh, and wildly promotable, avenue for drawing listeners into his web of fantasies. Over the years, Jones increasingly identified on-air with “the Patriots” in their “war against the globalists.” It was Jones, in fact, who broadly popularized the use of “Patriot” to describe himself and his fellow conspiracists.
In the early 2000s, much of the radical right, including white nationalists, began organizing around immigration as an issue because of what they saw as an unwelcome tide of nonwhites permanently altering the American cultural landscape. Among Patriots, vigilante border-watch militias were formed; they took it upon themselves to detain and threaten border crossers, motivated by a far-right conspiracy theory that immigration from Latin America was part of a New World Order plot to turn the American Southwest back over to Mexico in a “Reconquista.”
The most successful of these was the 2005 Minuteman Project. Patriots from around the country participated in a large vigilante patrol on the Mexico border that drew massive media coverage. Within five years, however, the Minutemen had crumbled apart amid internal bickering and the increasing criminality of its participants, culminating in the 2009 murders of an Arivaca, Arizona, man and his nine-year-old daughter in a botched home invasion by a Minuteman leader named Shawna Forde and her henchmen.[13] Minuteman cofounder Chris Simcox is now in prison for a child-molestation conviction.[14]
Around the time of the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, the Patriot movement suddenly came roaring back to life. While the numbers of militia groups had declined to a mere 131 groups in 2007, they revived sharply over the next two years, to 512. By 2012, there were a record 1,360 militia groups.[15]
The revival of the Patriot movement during the Obama years primarily revolved around the Tea Party movement. By mid-2010, it had become clear that the Tea Party—first promoted by mainstream media as a kind of normalized right-wing populist revolt against liberal Democratic rule in the Obama era—had swiftly transformed into a massive conduit for conspiracy theories, ideas, and agendas directly from the Patriot movement. Attending a Tea Party gathering after that year, particularly in places like rural Montana, was indistinguishable from the scene one could have found fifteen years before at a militia gathering: the same speakers, the same books, the same rhetoric, the same plenitude of paramilitary and survivalist gear for sale.[16]
The ultimate emblem of this ideological takeover by the Patriots was the ascendance of the Gadsden flag (“Don’t Tread On Me”) as the Tea Party’s most prominent symbol. The flag had originally been revived in the 1990s by the Patriot movement and was prominently displayed at their gatherings, as well as available through the Militia of Montana mail-order catalog. It was prominently used by Minutemen groups while organizing vigilante patrols on both the Mexican and Canadian US borders.
But soon after the Tea Party began organizing rallies in the spring and summer of 2009 the banner became the best-known symbol of that movement—reflective of the flood of Patriot movement ideologues who seized control of the Tea Party agenda.[17]
The yellow Gadsden flag and its coiled rattlesnake appeared during two armed standoffs with federal law enforcement in the West led by Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his family, first in Nevada in 2014, and then in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016.[18] Two of the participants in the Nevada standoff, Jerad and Amanda Miller, went on a murder spree two months afterward in Las Vegas; after shooting two police officers to death in a pizza parlor, they covered the slain officers’ bodies with a Gadsden flag.[19]
The same flag was waved by many of the mob that invaded the Capitol on January 6; one of the five people who died that day in the crowd, a thirty-four-year-old Georgia woman named Rosanne Boyland, had carried her own Gadsden flag to the rally (it was later determined she had died of an accidental amphetamine overdose).[20] One insurrectionist left their flag, still attached to its pole, sticking out of a large waste can for crews to clean up afterward.[21]
It now appears everywhere there is a right-wing protest, including Proud Boys marches. It flaps prominently from the back ends of jacked-up pickups that cruise with “Trump Trains” and anti–Joe Biden protests, alongside “Blue Lives Matter,” “Trump Is My President,” and “Fuck Biden” flags.
The seep of the Patriot movement’s most recognizable emblem into mainstream right-wing politics is symbolic of the movement’s gradual, and now seemingly complete, absorption into American conservative politics and, by extension, the Republican Party.
BACK IN 2009, WHEN the Tea Party was first gaining national recognition, one of the leading new faces among its increasingly dominant Patriot faction was an organization tailored to appeal to military veterans and law-enforcement officers, but also anyone with an inclination to paranoid right-wing conspiracy theories. They called themselves the Oath Keepers.
The brainchild of Stewart Rhodes, a Yale graduate and onetime staffer for Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, the Oath Keepers portrayed themselves as a kind of citizens’ defense against looming government tyranny by the people entrusted with enforcing its laws.[22] The core idea was that members would adopt their creed, detailing “ten orders” they “will not obey,” all supposedly involving commonsensical rights that everyone naturally would stand up for. However, none of the orders it lists pertain to any real threatened authoritarian commands; rather, they are a list of commands fevered right-wing conspiracy theorists claimed that New World Order conspirators were plotting to unleash:
We will NOT obey any order to disarm the American people.
We will NOT obey orders to conduct warrantless searches of the American people.
We will NOT obey orders to detain American citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants” or to subject them to military tribunal.
We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a “state of emergency” on a state.
We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty.
We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.
We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.
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.”
We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies.
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.[23]
In a 2009 interview, Rhodes pledged to “prevent a dictatorship in the United States” with his organization: “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.”[24]
Rhodes insisted he wanted nothing to do with white supremacists and distanced himself from the militia label: “We’re not a militia,” he said. “And we’re not part and parcel of the white supremacist movement. I loathe white supremacists.”
In reality, the Oath Keepers were associated with violent, threatening extremists from the very outset, and Rhodes later proved very tolerant indeed of white supremacists. One of the first prominent members of the group was a man named Charles Dyer, whose online nom de plume was July4Patriot.[25] He represented the Oath Keepers at early Tea Party events when he wasn’t producing ominous videos urging his fellow “Patriots” to prepare themselves for armed resistance to the newly elected Obama administration.
About a year later, in 2010, Dyer was arrested for raping his daughter and eventually convicted. Police found a missile launcher in his personal armory.[26] Stewart Rhodes and the Oath Keepers claimed he was never really a member and distanced themselves from Dyer as fast as they could.[27] (Rhodes’s ex-wife, Tasha Adams, later told me in an interview that Rhodes had taken Dyer under his wing, and Dyer had been sleeping on their couch around the time of his arrest.)[28]
By 2010, Patriot groups like the Oath Keepers had become the primary face of the Tea Party. Rhodes boasted of his prominent role in the movement to Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly: “We like the Tea Party movement a lot, we think it’s great. It’s a revitalization of our core Americanism and core constitutionalism.”
Rhodes structured the Oath Keepers as a nonprofit led by a board of directors. He served as the organization’s president, with a vice president and other elected or appointed national leaders. The national Oath Keepers emphasizes organizing around state and county militias at the local level. These county-level units are their action arm.[29]
According to a “warning order” issued by Rhodes, these units are “made up of willing patriots in a county, who are from that county, under leadership who are also from that county, elected by the men of that county.” Rhodes made it clear that the movement’s power came from communities, not from existing associations: “It’s not about our groups, whether we are Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, or self-organized local or state level militia groups…It’s about our communities…Form your community up and let the men elect their officers.”
The “warning order” described how each county unit would be comprised of two divisions: A quick reaction force (QRF), intended to be constituted of prepared-to-act and fit “patriots”; and a “Home Guard or Family Safe Unit” who would protect the QRF members’ families, homes, and communities.[30]
Rhodes always attempted to present Oath Keepers as a mainstream organization intent on “defending the Constitution” (and particularly gun rights), with an emphasis on protecting ordinary citizens from federal “tyranny,” but the facade was thoroughly exposed in 2009 by Justine Sharrock at Mother Jones, whose in-depth report revealed a cadre of armed and angry extremists with paranoid ideas and unstable dispositions behind the claims of normalcy and civic-mindedness, with the patina of authority that having military and law-enforcement veterans on your membership rolls can provide.[31]
The Oath Keepers played a prominent role in the 2014 Bundy ranch armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada, among them Stewart Rhodes.[32] The contingent of Patriot militiamen, many of them in Oath Keepers gear, grew large, and they played a key role in the April 14 conflict when weapons were drawn and the scene very nearly exploded into violence.[33]
Afterward, Oath Keepers organized the continuing presence of armed Patriots at the Bundy ranch to ensure that federal officers didn’t attempt any rear-guard actions. Things nearly devolved into a lethal mess later that month, though, when tensions between independent Patriot militiamen and the Oath Keepers boiled over.[34]
A paranoid rumor of an imminent drone strike on the encampment began circulating. The team spreading the drone-strike rumor—namely, Rhodes’s Oath Keepers—urged people to pull out, which sparked the wrath of militiamen. The militiamen accused the Oath Keepers of being “deserters” and voted to oust the Oath Keepers, and a couple even spoke of shooting Rhodes and his men in the back, which they deemed the proper battlefield treatment of runaways. The situation slowly defused as more participants became disillusioned and left.
The closing fiasco notwithstanding, the Bundy ranch standoff became a boon for the Oath Keepers. Rhodes realized that the key to recruiting new members entailed taking part in headline-grabbing news stunts involving concocted confrontations with government officials.
Rhodes’s version of accountability came into sharp focus when the Oath Keepers organized “vigils” outside military recruiting stations after right-wing media claimed that the Obama administration was leaving such stations vulnerable to terrorist attack by insisting that recruiters be unarmed. At one of these vigils, a would-be “protector” mishandled his rifle and dropped it, discharging a round that narrowly missed bystanders.[35]
Rhodes quickly waved off any responsibility, claiming that the man wasn’t a member: “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,” the article mused.
They were next seen in Oregon in April 2015, attempting to reenact the Bundy ranch standoff, this time at the remote Sugar Pine Mine near Grants Pass, where they claimed two longtime miners were being persecuted by the Bureau of Land Management—which, as in Nevada, was simply trying to enforce long-standing regulations by ordering the miners to clear away equipment and a cabin, both of which had been illegal for generations, from the claim they were working.[36] The standoff fizzled, however—mainly because no federal law enforcement attempted to engage them—and the Oath Keepers wandered away from the scene.[37] Many of its participants, however, soon after joined Cliven Bundy’s son Ammon in Burns, Oregon, during a monthlong armed standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge intended to protest the imprisonment of a pair of local ranchers, Dwight and Steven Hammond, for a federal public-lands arson conviction.
At the national level, the Oath Keepers voiced unhappiness with the occupation at the refuge’s operations center, not so much because it was illegal but, as Rhodes wrote, “specifically because it is not being done with the consent of the locals or at their request, without the request of the Hammond family…and because it is not in direct defense of anyone.” [38]
Rhodes attempted to play dealmaker by writing an open letter to Ammon Bundy, asking him “to submit yourself to the authority of the Committee of Safety and the people of Harney County at large, and let them know, in no uncertain terms, that they are now in charge, and you will comply with whatever they decide must be done, whether you agree with it or not.” Bundy declined.[39]
By mid-January, the Oath Keepers vigorously supported the armed occupation. Rhodes said it was “essentially a civil disobedience sit-in like the left has been doing for decades…People need to get over it and chill out.” On their website, the Oath Keepers called on their members to come to Harney County, much as it had done in Nevada in 2014.
Rhodes also appeared on the radio with LaVoy Finicum, a rancher from Utah who had joined the occupation, whose colorful personality had drawn a lot of media attention. The Oath Keepers leader advised Finicum to leave the refuge and seek the protection of a “constitutional” county sheriff. Two days later, Finicum was killed by state police troopers at an FBI roadblock en route to a meeting with Grant County’s “constitutional” sheriff, Glenn Palmer.[40] Though a few holdouts back at the refuge lingered for a couple of weeks, the arrests that day effectively ended the standoff.[41]
Many Patriots never forgave Rhodes or the Oath Keepers for their waffling at Malheur. Among them was Joseph Rice, who had led the Oath Keepers chapter in Josephine County involved in the would-be Sugar Pine Mine standoff, and then had served as chief liaison between the occupiers and federal officials at the Malheur. He left the organization afterward, disillusioned.
Rhodes, Rice said, was attracted to conflict as the centerpiece of the Oath Keepers’s business model: conflict brings media attention, which spurs income from donations, merchandise sales, and fifty-dollar-a-year membership dues.[42]
“Like a moth to the flame,” said Rice. “He flies in, throws up a PayPal, and then disappears.”
THE OATH KEEPERS, LIKE most Patriot groups, angrily reject charges that they are a racist or white-supremacist organization, and frequently point to members who are people of color as proof that they are not. However, the presence of such members, as well as the organization’s occasional rhetorical embrace of civil rights ideals, is a facade (along the lines of “my best friend is Black”) for a movement founded on a core of white-supremacist beliefs, reflected by their origins in the racist Posse Comitatus movement of the 1970s.
When you follow the conversations local activists have among themselves, however, openly racist ideas and sentiments come tumbling out. Responding to a Facebook post in a Patriot group proclaiming, “I’ve yet to meet a white supremacist,” Oregon Oath Keeper Sally Telford replied, “I am a proud white/Caucasian and I support and stand with all other white/Caucasians,“ and elaborated that, ”I stand with free white people.“[43]
It’s common for Patriot movement adherents to deny the existence of structural or interpersonal racism. They typically define it narrowly as hatred of individuals purely for their race, a “conscious, vocalized action.” The Oath Keepers, for instance, instructed readers at their now-defunct website to: “Realize there is no such thing as white privilege or male privilege: In reality, there is only institutionalized ‘privilege’ for victim-status groups. There is no privilege for whites, males, white males or straight white males.”
Even more acutely, the Patriot movement has long been antagonistic to a number of non-white ethnic groups and organizations:[44]
• Latino immigrants. One of its major subgroups that kept the Patriot movement alive in the early 2000s was the Minutemen vigilante border-watch movement of 2005–10, which organized public rallies that denigrated Hispanics and encouraged violence against them.
• Native Americans. Patriot movement conspiracists—many of them operating in states with Indian reservations and, consequently, conflicts between tribes and nontribal residents and fishermen over land and water rights—have been highly active in organizing campaigns, built primarily on “New World Order” conspiracy theories, to attack tribal treaty rights and even decertify certain tribes.
• Muslim refugees. A number of more recent Patriot groups have been highly active in promoting Islamophobic campaigns against Muslims generally and refugees in particular. In 2015–16, Three Percenter militia groups organized multiple protests in Idaho against the presence of a refugee-relocation program based in the city of Twin Falls, claiming it was part of a globalist conspiracy to eventually replace the white population there.
• Black Lives Matter. Most Patriot groups are unapologetic in their disdain and hatred for the Black Lives Matter movement. The Oath Keepers in particular have prominently attacked BLM activists as innately violent Marxists and a threat to the nation, as have Three Percenter militia groups and the Northwest-based Patriot Prayer street-brawling group, at whose events participants carried signs declaring, “BLM is a hate group.” When Proud Boys marched violently through the streets of Washington, D.C., on December 14, 2020, their primary targets became African American churches adorned with Black Lives Matter banners and signs, which they tore down and burned.
The underlying racism of the Patriot movement, however, is only one feature of the danger it poses to American democracy. The greater threat, indeed, lies in its conspiracism-fueled propensity for violence, embodied in its embrace of seditionist rhetoric about overthrowing the “globalist” government, and its fetish-like obsession with civil war.
GIVEN THEIR GROUNDING IN conspiracism, it was inevitable that, once the groundless conspiracy theories about Obama’s supposedly “fake” or “incomplete” birth certificate, known as the Birther theories, began circulating as early as 2008, the Patriot movement (and the Tea Party) would avidly embrace them. That’s also where Donald Trump first entered the picture.
Trump built the foundations of his political career in 2011 by promoting the Birther theories, creating such a broad media sensation that eventually, after two years of distractions created by the spread of this crackpottery into mainstream politics, Obama conceded and ordered Hawaii officials to publicly produce his “long-form” birth certificate in an attempt to satisfy the conspiracists. Of course, it signally failed to do so; encouraged by Trump’s public ambivalence over whether he accepted the evidence as legitimate, the conspiracists in no time produced a fresh round of theories claiming that the new certificate was fake.[45]
Around the same time, Trump claimed the mantle of leader for the Tea Party, telling a Fox interviewer: “I think the people of the Tea Party like me, because I represent a lot of the ingredients of the Tea Party. What I represent very much, I think, represents the Tea Party.”[46]
Beginning in mid-2015, Trump enjoyed substantial support for his 2016 presidential campaign from an array of radical-right organizations, notably a solid phalanx composed of the Patriot movement. His ascension to the presidency was widely hailed by various Patriots, not to mention Alex Jones, who had hosted Trump on his Infowars program.
The radical right’s subsequent focus on defending Trump became immediately apparent at his inauguration in 2017 when they turned out in numbers to combat what they described as an insidious, evil force known as “Antifa”—ostensibly the face of a Communist plot to prevent him from being sworn in. Even though that threat never materialized, the bogeyman they had concocted continued to play a central role in the conspiracist narrative that followed, including a brief panic in October and November of 2017, when Jones and other conspiracists claimed Antifa intended to attempt a coup against Trump.
No such coup ever materialized. But the ensuing narrative—depicting a “violent left” that needed to be violently confronted by “patriots”—was repeated throughout the 2020 election campaign, and ardently adopted by the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.
The Oath Keepers’s alignment with Trump came early and often in his tenure, and in typically paranoiac ways: The group was among the more belligerent promoters of far-right conspiracy theories, theories that eventually metastasized into the current mainstream-right narrative depicting Antifa and leftists as violent Marxists intent on destroying America. Early on they claimed “Marxist coups” against Trump were in the offing.[47]
At Trump events, Oath Keepers showed up to provide “security” intended to deal with protesters and “Antifa.”[48] When Trump tweeted out the suggestion that America was on the brink of a civil war should he be removed from office via impeachment, Rhodes responded with his tweet claiming that Americans “ARE on the verge of a HOT civil war.”[49]
The Oath Keepers were also present at some of the earliest far-right rallies on the West Coast in 2017, notably the ultraviolent riots in Berkeley, California, in April, as well as the large Patriot Prayer rally in Portland, Oregon, that followed the murder of two commuters on a MAX train by a far-right extremist. At the Berkeley event, Rhodes spoke to the crowd in front of an alt-right “Kekistan” banner, and he was followed on the dais by notorious white nationalist Brittany Pettibone.
Rhodes’s reputation among his far-right cohorts waxed and waned though, particularly as the Oath Keepers increasingly backed out of participation in various events. They failed to appear, for instance, at a protest against Democratic representative Maxine Waters that they themselves had organized.[50] Before a Proud Boys march in Portland on August 2019, Rhodes raised hackles by loudly announcing he was pulling Oath Keepers out of the event because of the likely presence of racist bigots among the Proud Boys and their allies, notably the American Guard.
“We do not, and cannot, knowingly associate with known or suspected white nationalists,” he claimed then.[51]
Rhodes’s vision for the Oath Keepers appears to have changed during the Trump years, his quest for legitimizing their paranoid worldview realized by becoming increasingly associated with the Trump campaign. The endpoint of this vision was for Oath Keepers to become an unofficial adjunct paramilitary force that could be deployed by President Trump at his own discretion—say, if he were to be impeached. Rhodes was explicit about this when he announced plans to provide a kind of specialized “Spartan” training program to prepare Oath Keepers for combat with “Antifa” and whatever other leftists might be lurking out there.
We’re going to have our most experienced law enforcement and military veterans, as well as firefighters, EMTs, Search and Rescue…so that they are available for the sheriff as a posse, under a Constitutional governor to be a state militia, or if it was called out by the President of the United States to serve as a militia of the United States…to execute our laws, repel invasions, and to suppress insurrections, which we’re seeing from the left right now.[52]
A key point frequently lost in Rhodes’s pseudo-legal babble is that the Oath Keepers are not only well outside the realm of any kind of authoritative law-enforcement entity, but they are also a private army that has no accountability to anyone. If anyone is injured or harmed by any Oath Keepers at these events, their history indicates that Rhodes and his group would simply disavow whatever member has been involved in the transgression.
The Oath Keepers’ belief in their own heroism, however, obscured any such niceties. What mattered to them was their belief that real Patriots backed Trump to the hilt, and would go to war for him. Even civil war.
A shooting in Portland, Oregon, was the final straw for Rhodes. In late August 2020, a marcher with the Proud Boy–esque Patriot Prayer street-brawling group was shot and killed one night by a self-described anti-fascist during a brief confrontation downtown (federal marshals shortly tracked down and killed the shooter). Rhodes declared “civil war” and urged Trump to declare martial law.
Rhodes went ballistic on Twitter and on the Oath Keepers website, proffering what he considered the appropriate response: Donald Trump needed to declare a national emergency and an insurrection in the city, send in troops, and arrest anyone they identify as “Antifa.” He vowed that should Trump fail to do that, Oath Keepers would organize “constitutional” militias to go there and do it themselves.[53]
The Oath Keepers were only one of many voices vowing revenge for the shooting death of Aaron Danielson, thirty-nine, of Portland. But Rhodes was much more specific: “This was a terror attack, on US soil, by a member of an international terrorist organization—Antifa,” he wrote. “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.”
TRUMP HAD CALLED HIS followers “patriots” for a very long time, including in his fundraising emails. What’s noteworthy is that he often applied it to a specific bandwidth of his supporters—namely, those engaging in acts of intimidation and thuggery against leftists and liberals.
It served as a neat rhetorical trick for Trump: playing on neutral observers’ propensity to interpret the use of the word generically, while acting as a direct dogwhistle to his followers who identified with the Patriot movement. Even more Machiavellian was the effect its use had on nonextremist supporters by encouraging them to identify indirectly with a far-right movement.
Throughout his tenure, Trump made regular references to “patriots” in his speeches. In his September 2019 speech to the United Nations he declared: “The future belongs to patriots.” He used the word to describe backers of his attempt at shutting down the government in 2019, and for farmers who had been devastated by his trade war with China. He also described members of his administration as “great patriots,” as well as Republican candidates he endorsed.
Trump’s campaign emails also regularly used the word, encouraging donations by describing recipients as patriots, and particularly for supporters who attended his rallies and purchased his MAGA merchandise. Notably, in 2020 and afterward, these emails regularly capitalized “Patriot” to describe would-be donors.
On the same August 2020 evening when Danielson was shot, a “Trump caravan”—with the usual Trump, Gadsden “Don’t Tread On Me,” “Blue Lives Matter,” and ordinary American flags streaming from their pickups—drove through downtown Portland, Oregon, engendering images of his Proud Boys supporters firing paint and pellet guns at protesters. Trump tweeted out a video of the caravan on the move, hailing its participants as “GREAT PATRIOTS!”
The violent rhetoric intensified after Trump lost the election. Oath Keepers began discussing what a civil war would entail. “It’s time to start killing the news media live on air,” one of them opined in an Oath Keepers channel.
Rhodes spoke at a December 12, 2020, pro-Trump rally in Washington and urged him to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law. On the Oath Keepers website, he had pleaded with Trump in a December 23 open letter: “Do your duty, and do it now. Recognize you are already in a war, and you must act as a wartime president, and there is not a minute to lose.”
THE CORE ANIMATING BELIEFS of the Patriot Movement today are either direct descendants of their original worldview from the old far-right white-supremacist movements (in particular, the Posse Comitatus) in which they are rooted; permutations of long-held cultural values; or modern-day adaptations of those values to fit their narratives about current events and politics:
• The world is secretly controlled by an elite cabal of “globalists” who seek to enslave the world under a single, tyrannical world government (long known, and still referred to at times, as the New World Order).
• The “unpatriotic” Americans they oppose—variously liberal Democrats, civil rights and immigrant-rights leaders, environmentalists, mainstream journalists—are the willing tools of socialists,who are Marxists, who are Communists, who are actually the real fascists. All are worthy of elimination.
• In addition to the government, media and educational institutions are under the control of the cabal, and are dedicated to brainwashing American children with Marxist propaganda.
• All of these coconspirators are encouraging non-white immigration into America so that the traditional white demographic base of the country will be permanently altered with more “obedient” races.
• America is not a democracy; it is a republic. “Democracy” is a socialist lie.
• The Second Amendment not only forbids gun-safety restrictions, it also enshrines the formation of private armies accountable to no one because they are “militias.”
• The same amendment exists to enable ordinary citizens to obtain any kind of armament they desire so that they can rise up and prevent any kind of “Communist takeover” by taking up arms against a “tyrannical” world government. (This is known as the insurrectionary theory of the Second Amendment.)
• The globalist cabal knows that the resulting heavily armed populace is the chief obstacle for their nefarious schemes, which is why they work so relentlessly to undermine the Second Amendment—and why Patriots must defend it with their blood and their arms.
• The Constitution severely limits the power of the federal government, which should not be permitted to own federal lands, enforce civil rights or environmental laws, engage in overseeing public education, or any other traditional function outside of providing a national defense.
• The extraordinary extremism now exhibited by their enemies—endorsing “socialist” government-funding schemes, supporting same-sex marriage and abortion rights, embracing a movement to end racist policing—means they have been overwhelmed by Marxist ideology and are an existential threat to their Republic.
This means that any kind of force, especially lethal force, is a reasonable response to this threat.
• Donald Trump’s presidency came under relentless attack from the globalist conspiracy even before he won election, because he is a real American Patriot who espouses and defends real American values. The 2020 election was stolen from him by the cabal using election fraud, and the January 6 riot in Washington, D.C., was a justifiable attempt by ordinary Patriots to prevent the theft of his presidency.
• Joe Biden is not only being controlled by the elite cabal, he is also in the pocket of the Chinese Communist Party, and his administration is now engaged in a program of destroying America to pave the way for a Communist takeover.
These beliefs, all of them fundamentally extremist, form the cornerstones of the Patriot movement’s worldview and how it organizes and recruits. And as we can see, a number of them are being voiced steadily and regularly by ostensibly mainstream right-wing figures, particularly Fox News pundits, social media trolls, and Republican politicians.
This is how extremism has crept into the mainstream, like the Gadsden flag: unremarked upon, quietly, and with only a few raised eyebrows within mainstream political discourse. In the same way, the Patriot movement has silently insinuated itself at the center of that discourse and radicalized an entire political party along the way.
The Patriot movement is the nexus of the insurgent war on democracy that is currently well underway. And January 6 was their open declaration of that war.
AS THE EVIDENCE PILED up and the federal indictments from the January 6 insurrection mounted, a clearer picture of what happened that day began to emerge. At the center of that picture was the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, who, as we have seen, played key roles in overwhelming Capitol Police barricades that day and leading the mob inside the building.
Ominously, the response to one of the indictments raised the possibility that these groups may have been coordinating with official law-enforcement authorities: Ohio militia leader Jessica Watkins’s attorneys claimed in a filing that she had been organizing “security” at the Donald Trump rally at the Ellipse prior to the Capitol siege and had been communicating with members of Trump’s Secret Service. The court filing said:
On January 5 and 6, Ms. Watkins was present not as an insurrectionist, but to provide security to the speakers at the rally, to provide escort for the legislators and others to march to the Capitol as directed by the then-President, and to safely escort protestors away from the Capitol to their vehicles and cars at the conclusion of the protest…She was given a VIP pass to the rally. She met with Secret Service agents. She was within 50 feet of the stage during the rally to provide security for the speakers. At the time the Capitol was breached, she was still at the site of the initial rally where she had provided security.[54]
The Secret Service adamantly denied that it had employed any Oath Keepers: “To carry out its protective functions on January 6th, the U.S. Secret Service relied on the assistance of various government partners. Any assertion that the Secret Service employed private citizens to perform those functions is false,” a spokesperson said in a statement to CNN.
The indictments themselves also pointed to the Oath Keepers playing a central role in the coordinated attack that opened the doors of the Capitol to the mob.[55] Conspiracy charges against six people—including Watkins—detailed how they formed a stack (typically a maneuver requiring military training) to move their phalanx of body-armored members up the east steps of the Capitol and into the front, where they were able to overpower the police.
The court documents said that Oath Keepers considered bringing “heavy weapons” to Washington after the election. Some members indicated plans to bring mace, gas masks, batons, and armor to the Capitol—however, they were in agreement not to bring guns to Washington because of local anti-gun laws. Instead, they chose to create a quick reaction force with weapons several minutes away, stashed in vehicles and hotel rooms.
Watkins and coconspirator Bennie Parker communicated their plans via text messages over several months. In a November conversation, Parker wrote: “Unfortunately, we can’t take weapons.” Watkins replied: “Not into the city, no. Just mace, tasers and nightsticks.”[56]
It was obvious the prosecutors were circling around Rhodes’s organization as well as Rhodes himself. Filings in Watkins’s case showed Rhodes had used the encrypted platform Signal to chat with her and Kelly Meggs. The filing said he directed them to rally during the siege to the Capitol’s southeast steps, following which members forcibly entered the east side of the building.
Prosecutors said the chat recovered on Signal called “DC OP: Jan 6 21” showed “that individuals, including those alleged to have conspired with [others], were actively planning to use force and violence.” They asserted that Rhodes, Watkins, Meggs, and “regional Oath Keeper leaders” discussed plans to “provide security to speakers and VIPs” at events on January 5 and 6 in Washington with members and affiliates.
The messages, combined with Rhodes’s previous statements, “all show that the co-conspirators joined together to stop Congress’s certification of the Electoral College vote, and they were prepared to use violence, if necessary, to effect this purpose,” prosecutors said. “They were plotting to use violence to support the unlawful obstruction of a Congressional proceeding.”
Rhodes claimed the new allegations were “total nonsense.” In a text to The Washington Post, he said the government was trying to “bootstrap” a few Oath Keepers’ actions into a conspiracy in order to depict his organization as the “boogeyman.”[57]
“They are trying to manufacture a nonexistent conspiracy,” Rhodes said, “I didn’t say 'don’t enter the Capitol,' I never figured they would do that.” He added of federal investigators, “They got nothing, they got a message from me saying, 'Meet here.'”
In a lengthy interview with the Post Rhodes denied that he had any advance knowledge of any Oath Keepers’ plans to invade the Capitol. He instead blamed members who “went off the reservation.”
“Just so we’re clear on this: We had no plan to enter the Capitol, zero plan to do that, zero instructions to do that, and we also had zero knowledge that anyone had done that until after they had done that—afterwards,” Rhodes said.
He added: “They went totally off mission. They didn’t coordinate with us at all while they were there. They did their own damned thing.” He also claimed that Thomas Caldwell, who led the Oath Keepers’ “Stack One” into the Capitol, was not actually a dues-paying member of Oath Keepers.
Nonetheless, Rhodes anticipated being arrested. “I want to say a few things before they send me off to a gulag,” he told the audience at a right-wing anti-immigration rally in Texas in March 2021.[58]
“I may go to jail soon,” Rhodes said. “Not for anything I actually did, but for made-up crimes. There are some Oath Keepers right now along with Proud Boys and other patriots who are in D.C. who are sitting in jail denied bail despite the supposed right to a jury trial before you’re found guilty and presumption of innocence, were denied bail because the powers that be don’t like their political views.”
He also claimed his members were innocent. “If we actually intended to take over the Capitol, we’d have taken it, and we’d have brought guns,” Rhodes said. “That’s not why we were there that day. We were there to protect Trump supporters from Antifa.”
Finally, in mid-January 2022, more than a year after the insurrection, the Justice Department closed the circle by charging Rhodes and ten other Oath Keepers—most of them already in detention—for seditionist conspiracy. They arrested him at a home in Texas where he had been hiding out.[59]
The indictment charged Rhodes and his fellow Oath Keepers with organizing a wide-ranging plot to storm the Capitol to prevent the certification of Biden’s victory. His attorneys later tried to assert that Rhodes and his Oath Keepers were awaiting word from Trump that day giving them the green light to act on his behalf as his personal militia. Nonetheless, the attorneys said, “To date, we are unaware of any direct communications that ever took place between the Oath Keepers and Trump, or anyone in his inner circle.”
Rhodes’s indictment revealed more than a mountain of evidence that the Justice Department had acquired in the prosecutions of key players in the insurrection. It also made clear the DOJ’s larger strategy of moving up the food chain of players in the historic attack—with Donald Trump and his inner circle now only steps away.
THE TRIAL OF STEWART Rhodes and four other Oath Keepers who participated in the Capitol siege—Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins, and Thomas Caldwell—on charges of seditionist conspiracy, obstructing the congressional affirmation of Biden’s victory, and impeding lawmakers on January 6 finally got under way in early October 2022.[60] From the outset, prosecutors emphasized the threat to American democracy their actions manifested.
“That was their goal — to stop by whatever means necessary the lawful transfer of presidential power, including by taking up arms against the United States government,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Nestler said during opening statements in federal court. The conspirators descended on Washington “to attack not just the Capitol, not just Congress, not just our government—but our country itself.”
Throughout the trial, jurors were shown evidence demonstrating the procession of steps that Rhodes and his cohorts took to prepare for “the insurrection” on January 6: how Rhodes spent thousands of dollars on a rifle, firearm accessories, and paramilitary gear; how the Oath Keepers cached firearms at a Virginia hotel the day before for a “quick reaction force” standing by in the event that Trump called on them.
Private communications between Rhodes and others he presumed to be Trump confidants showed how he demanded they pressure the defeated president to make that call, both before and after January 6. In the days following the insurrection, Rhodes used the phone of a man he believed to be in contact with Trump to send the then-president a message: “You must use the Insurrection Act and use the power of presidency to stop him. All us veterans will support you,” Rhodes wrote.[61]
Their attorneys tried various strategies to assert the defendants’ innocence. Caldwell’s attorneys attempted to blame the FBI for allegedly manipulating them into breaking the law, while Rhodes’s attorneys claimed that all of his invocations of the Insurrection Act and his “constitutionalist” conspiracy theories were simply matters of free speech.
None of it worked. On November 29, after two days of deliberation, the jury returned a mixed but unmistakable verdict: Rhodes and Meggs were guilty of seditious conspiracy, obstructing an official proceeding, and destroying evidence. Caldwell, Watkins, and Harrelson also were convicted of the latter charges, while Meggs and Watkins were also convicted of conspiring to stop the congressional proceeding and (along with Harrelson) interfering with members of Congress in the attack.
While awaiting sentencing, Rhodes testified via cell phone in the December 2022 trial of an Alaska lawmaker accused of violating the state’s disloyalty clause by virtue of his membership in the Oath Keepers. When attorneys queried him about whether the Oath Keepers’s behavior on January 6 was an act of sedition, he insisted that it was the opposite.[62]
“My perspective is that we’re preserving the Constitution, and it’s—I wouldn’t even call it insurrection, I would call it a counter-revolution against an insurrection,” Rhodes answered. “It’s my opinion that the left was engaged in open insurrection throughout 2020.”