In February 2018, my children and I escaped what I felt was a very dangerous marriage. I secretly packed the last of my children’s important documents into my oldest son’s truck while two of my kids were ducked down onto the floorboards. My heart was beating so hard, it was almost all I could hear. The next 30 seconds would change everything, one way or another.
As we pulled away, my then-husband ran out of the house, but then stopped. “Pick up a steak on your way back,” he called out. And that was it. Two years of planning led to that one moment.
As is often the case, things didn’t start out that way.
Even on our best days, when Stewart was at his most romantic, just the slightest curve could change everything.
The day I first spotted the now infamous founder of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, he wasn’t clad in camouflage or a black cowboy hat. With still two good eyes, he wasn’t outfitted with his iconic leather eye-patch. Nor was he stirring up a sea of followers with a speech that ended with a fist pump and a resounding shout of “Hoo-uh!” Instead, in the early spring of 1991, he was shuffling awkwardly with his dance teacher, mouthing, “Cha-cha, 1-2-3, cha-cha, 1…” to himself in a Las Vegas dance studio as he tried to keep up with her steps. I noticed him immediately because it was the first time in a week that a student under 65 years old had been inside the strip mall dance studio plunked between Mountain View Tax Preparers and The Kopper Keg, where I was then training to be a dance instructor. Later, when we were properly introduced, he bought me a soda in lieu of a beer (I was still a teenager) from the Elks Lodge bar counter and we danced a rumba together.
As our relationship progressed, we made a lot of plans for the future. There was little sign of the person he would become; I had no way of knowing the man I was with would be convicted of seditious conspiracy and spend time in prison for orchestrating crowds to storm the U.S. Capitol; that newly-elected President Donald Trump would then commute his 18-year sentence and release him and he’d return to Capitol Hill praising the new Trump era.
Back then, on our days off, we would scan the newspapers for open houses and visit several in a day in our best clothes with fancy coffees in hand. At 25, he was only a couple years out of the Army after a parachuting accident had abruptly ended his military career, and he was still rethinking his life path. He told me all about his visions for the future that included college and maybe even graduate school.
He often suggested it in a way that made me feel guilty — that he didn’t have the supportive family that I did, that life wasn’t as easy for him.
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I felt completely swept up. In retrospect, there was plenty in our relationship to give me pause. Even on our best days, when Stewart was at his most romantic, just the slightest curve could change everything. Knocking a drink over on the table was enough to “ruin the whole day.” He could go from laughing to slamming things around with no warning at all. And I would be left trying to make some sort of sense of it all.
Eventually, we decided the only way we could really move forward with our plans was for me to support him as he attended school. I dropped out of college, quit the job that I loved as a dance instructor and stopped attending time consuming dance auditions and competitions. I began working as an exotic dancer to pay for our rent as well as many of his hobbies like martial arts and nights out with his friends. I thought if I could give him all the love and support that he claimed to have missed out on growing up, that I could somehow heal him. He explained to me that he only lost his temper in the way that he did because he wasn’t on the path he was meant to be on. It was all just a sort of “restlessness,” as he called it, that he only experienced when he wasn’t on track. I was impressed that he seemed to feel such a sense of destiny.
He suggested starting an organization, something he had talked about a lot over the years. I had a glimmer of hope that this could be it; this could finally be the missing piece that made him whole.
He graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and after a stint working in Washington, D.C. for congressman Ron Paul in 1998, he graduated Yale Law School in 2004 just before turning 40. By the time we left New Haven for his clerkship with the Arizona Supreme court, we had three small children. But I was still waiting for his yet undefined “restlessness” to subside. His constant search for purpose meant we moved a lot. I counted 20 moves in as many years, several of them cross-country.
Finally, he claimed to have found his purpose. He was going to be a small-town litigator. Montana was going to be our new home. It was short lived, however, and just a year and half later we were back in Las Vegas, where he briefly worked for a construction defect law firm.
It was around this time that he suggested starting an organization, something he had talked about a lot over the years. I had a glimmer of hope that this could be it; this could finally be the missing piece that made him whole. But instead of healing his restlessness, it seemed to only embolden the worst in him.
His big idea was everything he thought it would be and more. His group immediately went viral within the 2009 Libertarian blog-o-sphere. He had had this ability to draw people around him for as long as I knew him. Throughout the years, he was always instructing classes. The topic mattered little — anything from women’s self-defense to the U.S. Constitution — but it always resulted in a cult following of hanger on-ers. People would encircle him while he talked on and on. Six p.m. classes turned into 10 p.m. parking lot lectures after the staff flickered the lights to usher us outside. The parking lot tour would often shift over to Denny’s until 2 a.m., with the kids and I nodding off at the table or sleeping in the car while we waited. Even after he climbed into the car to drive home, he’d roll down the window, the last of his audience leaning on the car door while he carried on to the last.
Oath Keepers at its height had 40,000 dues-paying members (many of them police officers and politicians according to a leaked membership list) making it the largest militia in modern American history. Stewart held his followers’ attention with his uncanny ability to elicit their emotions in the same mesmerizing way many cult leaders do. He often focused on disillusioned veterans who were hungry for purpose and to regain a sense of mission they had lost. Oath Keepers gave them not just a brotherhood, but a task: “One more tour of duty, because your oath never expired!” as Stewart often told them. He ramped them up with his fervent speeches and then set them loose to further his own goals. Several of his schemes made national news, the 2014 Bundy Ranch stand-off being just one.
In January 2021, my children and I watched from afar as the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and several smaller groups joined forces to storm the Capitol (Stewart himself did not enter the Capitol that day). We saw the kind of chaos that can be unleashed when more than one carnival barker works together toward a symbiotic con.
After the 2024 election, with Trump granting clemency for Stewart and many others who participated in the insurrection on Jan. 6, it might appear to some that their star is rising again. But I’m not convinced.
If there is one useful lesson I learned from 30 years with someone like Stewart Rhodes, it’s that false promises and the smoke and mirrors magic tricks to woo crowds are not something that can last. Real change requires more than just an emotional surge. Without substance, the fervor always ends eventually. And even the most skilled of flim-flam men lose the faith of the crowd when the house lights click back on. Today, I’m only looking ahead. I work full time, have taken a few college courses and have been slowly piecing together a memoir. I don’t know what the future holds, but, like many, I’m here to face it the best I can. And I hope that when the dust finally settles, we can all move forward.
