By Robin Givhan / The Washington Post
Stewart Rhodes founded the Oath Keepers in 2009 as a hedge against a federal government that he believed was hungering for too much power. He recruited former members of law enforcement and military veterans, folks he thought understood what it meant to take an oath and honor it. Before long, he had thousands of members who were chest-thumping and trash-talking the government, democracy and the very foundational values that allowed them to complain and moan; and to strut about with an overabundance of entitlement.
If they were aggrieved, it was only because they didn’t get their way.
Now Rhodes, along with four of his cohorts, is on trial in federal court in Washington, D.C., for seditious conspiracy. He is accused of plotting with others to overthrow the government on Jan. 6, 2021. Rhodes argues that there was no such conspiracy, no offensive strategy. He was simply providing security for protesters and awaiting orders from President Donald Trump; waiting for Trump to give the go ahead to battle fellow Americans in service to him, a would-be despot.
Rhodes is facing a jury of his peers. He’s facing the people, the institutions, the grand experiment of the Founding Fathers that he was itching to confront.
Rhodes, 57, is one of the most distinctive characters associated with that terrible day. His recruits looked like a parade of anonymous lemmings hopped up on rage and self-regard as they snaked their way up the Capitol steps in a single-file line, one that cut through the chaotic crowds to sow their own horrible mayhem. Rhodes, who stayed outside, is the face that defines the movement.
He’s a stocky man with a round face, a thinning buzz cut, a goatee and glasses. His most distinguishing feature is a black eye patch that he wears due to a firearm accident that those close to him said occurred while he was cleaning his gun. He is often pictured in an Oath Keepers baseball cap with the organization’s yellow logo and the designation: Lifetime Member, as if that is some grand honorific. He seems to enjoy the look of olive drab camouflage. It calls to mind the Army paratrooper that he once was. He carries around two-way radios like he’s on night patrol even if he’s just working crowd control at a Trump rally. At his most combative, Rhodes is the fulsome commander in military gear acting as though a trip to a stadium is a journey through the heart of darkness.
Rhodes has militarized civilian life by romanticizing deadly force and calling it patriotism. He has turned public service into a threat. He is a man who stands in the town square calling out to be part of something. He and the government disagree on exactly what that something is.
Over time, Rhodes has cast himself as both outsider and insider. He isn’t part of the Establishment, yet he presents himself as someone who knows all of the Establishment’s secret misdoings. He is contradictions and misdirection.
Rhodes is a Yale Law School graduate. That cerebral aspect of his character is more readily discerned when he’s delivering talks on patriotism while wearing a too-big jacket and tie. His Oath Keepers attire might have one think that he has the sort of booming baritone that commands authority from 50 paces, but his speechifying tone is light on bass and heavy on dire warnings.
“This government is wildly outside of the Constitution, and so is every level of government all the way down to your town council,” Rhodes said during a speech posted to YouTube in 2014. But not to worry. “All those who’ve sworn the oath to defend the Constitution … as long as we still draw breath, the republic lives inside of us.”
The republic may live inside Rhodes, but he was determined to avoid its capital for his trial. Defense lawyers representing the accused tried mightily to avoid a jury trial, specifically they aimed to avoid one in Washington. They wanted to move it to Virginia. They wanted to dodge the citizens of Washington: the lawyers and bureaucrats and cogs in the system who keep so much of the country churning along, not in the dramatic ways that get parsed on social media or highlighted in a breaking news feed, but in the boring and thankless, yet essential, ways. It’s true that residents here were affected by Jan. 6 in a manner that the country at large was not. The insurrection was not an event that unfolded at a distance but one that exploded just down the block, around the corner, across the street.
The judge denied the defense request. And so a trial in Washington forces the defendants, especially Rhodes, to see the faces of the Establishment, of the government that was attacked that day. The Oath Keepers didn’t terrorize some omnipotent force. They terrorized people. They terrorized neighbors: People who have taken an oath. A population of public servants. A bunch of law school graduates, smarty-pants and East Coast elites. A bunch of folks who just might see the reality behind the costumes and posturing and aw-shucks-it-was-just-talk excuses.
Rhodes denigrates the government, and the government is made up of people. It isn’t an inanimate structure. And having to stand trial in the nation’s capital, having to be judged by the men and women who make sure that the Social Security checks reach bank accounts, that Medicare bills are paid, that devastated communities get financial aide after a hurricane or wildfire, may force a tiny reminder of the truth.
Jan. 6 was an attack on democracy. But it was also an attack on people. On the peers that Rhodes desperately pretends he can’t see.
Robin Givhan is senior critic-at-large writing about politics, race and the arts. A 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, Givhan has also worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue magazine and the Detroit Free Press. Follow her on Twitter @RobinGivhan.
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