Episode 3: No Ordinary Rioters

There were those at the Capitol insurrection who got carried away in the moment and acted rashly. There were others who planned for violence from the start. Robert Evans looks under the hood of the most extensively prosecuted paramilitary organization from the Capitol insurrection.

The Assault on America is produced by Cool Zone Media, iHeartRadio, and Novel.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Before we get into it, be advised that this series
contains bad language and references to violence. At two thirty
p m. On January six, the crowd at the east
side of the US Capital is a mass of heaving bodies.

(00:24):
Rioters are surging forward as police in body armor attempt
to hold the line. Limbs, flagpoles, batons, railings, and riot
shields are tangling in a violent mess. But in the
midst of the chaos, a small group stands out from
everyone else. They're decked out in full camo with body armor,

(00:45):
helmets and radios. Okay, guys, were on open channel here.
Now everybody can hear and talk. What makes them different
is the way they're moving. They're walking slowly in single file,
each with a hand on the shoulder of the person
in front. They're piercing through the crowd, working their way
to the front. In the military, this way of moving

(01:05):
is known as a ranger file or ranger stack. It's
a standard formation for ground troops about to breach a building.
And that's exactly what this group is going to do.
This is what we lived up for, everything we fucking
trained for. They're communicating via a walkie talkie app called Zello,

(01:26):
the name of their channel, stopped the Steel j six.
Like tens of thousands of their fellow protesters, these people
want to prevent what they see as the theft of
a presidential election. They've just thought it out a bit
more than everyone else. We have a good, great We
got about thirty of us were sticking together and sticking

(01:47):
to the plan. This unit believes that today is their
last chance to save American democracy. Today they can become heroes.
That's right, mother, This is a can of war bass
made in America. Fu. Yeah, in the coming weeks and months,

(02:08):
almost every member of this unit will be identified and arrested.
Today they're facing some of the most serious criminal charges
to stem from the riot. But that's all for the future.
For now, they're having the time of their lives. The

(02:32):
squadron that pierced the capital like human bayonets on January
six were no ordinary rioters. The men and women who
moved in military formation that day were members of a
well armed paramilitary force that boasts chapters all over the
United States. They were, in short, members of a militia.

(02:55):
In this episode, we're going to look under the hood
of one of the biggest militia pops in the United
States and figure out how they fit into the picture.
On January six, we'll meet the guy who founded the
organization and still runs it today. We'll also explore the
life of one of his foot soldiers who invaded the
capital in the ranger Stack and fought his way into

(03:18):
the Great Hall underneath the Capital Dome. So come with
me into the United States Capital. From the teams at
Cool Zone Media, I Heart Radio and Novel This is
the Assault on America Episode three, no Ordinary Rioters. M

(03:58):
America has always had militia's back. In the eighteenth century,
they were a way of organizing resistance against the British,
and George Washington would never have beat the Red Coats
without them. This is what gives modern militias a patina
of credibility, and the way people in the Patriot movement
talk today about seventeen seventy six, you'd think they'd personally
skewered Redcoats on their bayonets at the Battle of Long Island. Now,

(04:27):
the militia heyday in the eighteenth century was well before
the United States had a standing army of its own,
bigger and better and stronger than ever before. These days,
America does have a standing army, a fairly large one.
Nobody's gonna mess where those folks nobody, So you might
ask yourself, why, in the year one are there hundreds

(04:50):
of unregulated militia groups spread around the country and armed
to the teeth. I spoke to someone who might know.
I've probably dozens of threats that I've recorded in Zelo,
like specifically against me for writing about groups. Hampton Stall
is the editor of Militia Watch, a research platform that

(05:10):
covers America's far right militia's He's also the guy who
recorded the audio of militia members you heard at the
start of the episode. Hampton worked with a w n
y C journalist named Michael Loewinger, and together they eaves
dropped on militia groups as the capital was stormed. I mean,
it gets your heart racing, like it's It's definitely an

(05:31):
adrenaline shot, especially when it's groups that are, like, you know,
a twenty minute drive from my front door. Hampton grew
up in upstate South Carolina. It is deep red territory,
and when the populist right wing Tea Party movement burst
onto the national stage in the late two thousand's, they
gained a lot of support in Hampton's hometown. It was

(05:52):
around then that Hampton noticed something else happening too. I
started seeing people from teep party groups start taking up
arms and start saying kind of wild phrases, and so
there's sort of a personal interest in like, who the
hell were these people that were marching around armed in
my hometown. Militia movements have waxed and waned throughout America's history.

(06:17):
In the nineteen eighties and early nineties, militias blossomed tied
to the militant white supremacist movement, but they fell into
decline after militia member Timothy McVeigh carried out the Oklahoma
City bombing. In and later on during the Obama years,
Hampton witnessed firsthand the resurgence of American militias. Many of

(06:38):
these groups were motivated by conspiracy theories that the new
black liberal president was planning to mobilize the National Guard
against gun owners and put them in concentration camps. And
it wasn't just ordinary civilians who were falling for this stuff.
I've detected multiple times active police officers involved in militia spaces,

(06:58):
and they've been in all the way up to chain,
from just kind of expressing support to people who are
in militia's to joining, you know, militia chats on Facebook,
to even being members of militia groups. The whole gamut
has kind of been seen more on that later in
the series. After being reignited by the election of Obama,

(07:19):
America's militia movement was given a massive boost in two
thousand sixteen. Suddenly the government that militia's loved to hate
was taken over by someone they straight up loved. That
is some group of people thousands so nice, Thank you
very much, that's really nice. Here was a president they

(07:41):
could get on board with, someone with obvious disdain for
the workings of government, and someone who's far right rhetoric
was more of an air rate than a dog whistle.
They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, their rapists, and some
I assume are good people. So when Trump lost in
twenty twenty, many of America's militias weren't pleased, and in

(08:04):
the winter months following the election, lots of them got
caught up in Alie Alexander's Stopped the Steel campaign, which
we covered in the last episode. Even if they never
heard the name Ali Alexander, they heard about January six.
I saw it everywhere, maybe just before Christmas. People were

(08:27):
talking about January six pretty aggressively at the time. They
were saying things like we're going to go to the
tunnels of the Capitol and fight Antifa down there, which
is just like way more specific than stuff that had
been being said for the last few months. So that's
kind of what the big warning sign was for me.
That made me realize, you know, it's probably a good
idea when January six came around, to sit down at

(08:50):
my computer and be watching the feeds to try and
document what sort of armed groups were present, And that's
how Hampton came to be recording the Zelo channel called
Stop the Steel j six during the Capitol riot. In
the roughly two hours of audio, we hear a militia

(09:10):
member report back to her friends elsewhere in the country
as she storms the capital. At the start of the recording,
there's palpable excitement in her voice as she nears her target.
Everybody's marching on the Capitol, all million of us. It's insane.
We're about two blocks away from it now. Police are
doing nothing. They're not even trying to stop us. At
this point. As she reports back, voices from across the

(09:31):
country cheer her on joking about draining the swamp. Trump's
been trying to drain the swamp with a straw. We
just brought a shop back. We're gonna have to blow
the damn to drain this fucking swamp. Be safe down here,
That's all I gotta say. Just be safe, be alert,
and stay in groups. Like it's Christmas all over again
for us patriots. Alas the Christmas vibes are few and

(09:53):
far between and the rest of the audio, most of
the voices are considerably more disturbing. They've got the gallows
that upside the Capitol building. It's trying to start sucking
using them. Patriots need to have the guns nearby. The
FBI rats are trapped on the roof and they have
nowhere to go. I won't take you through the whole thing.

(10:17):
I wouldn't do that to you. But here are some headlines.
For one, these guys are obsessed with Antifa. We're not
dumbasses like anti Tifa. They hate Mike Pence. We got
a report that Pence is a pedophile, unindicted pedophile, and
They have fascinating theories about what Joe Biden does with

(10:39):
his downtime. He's hiding an ambrazement balance and little kids
off his back and having him play with his blonde
leg or looker. My team was unable to fact check
this allegation, but you get the point. The voices on
this channel are not part of the same reality that
I live in and probably that you live in. Two
and neither are the militia members and the Rangers stacks.

(10:59):
I think the crowd. While the Zelo channel cheers them
on with heartwarming messages of encouragement, the unit on the
ground achieves their objective. We are in the main dome
right now. We are rocking at their their longer nets.
They're perk and shooting people with payballs. But we're in
here fucking gets some God blessom God's being, and keep going.
Get it, Jess. For the militia members, this is a

(11:24):
moment of pure jubilation. But what's extraordinary is the fact
that none of them seem bothered or even aware that
they're breaking the law. As they speak freely on a
public walkie talkie channel. It's clear that they feel they're
on the right side of history and thus untouchable by
law enforcement. Patriots are taking self east together with capital police.

(11:45):
Inside the capital, they even reassure each other that their
actions are legal, using highly dubious jargon the civilian authority
of we the people, constitutional enforcement action, direct action. There
seems to be no understanding that those who enter the

(12:05):
capital maskless and openly boasting on social media are putting
themselves in legal jeopardy. Then again, perhaps it's what we
should expect from an outfit whose getaway plan and involves
hijacking federal snowplows. Those snowplows are going to be easily
hot wired their diesel trucks. That's the way out if
need to be. They belong to us, the taxpayers, We

(12:29):
the fucking people. Now, I wouldn't begrudge my tax dollars
going towards the world's slowest police chase with a few
dozen militia members crammed into snowplows. But the point stands
anyone who would even consider that route is not part
of a world class conspiracy. And that's because the militias
that breached the capital and the voices cheering them from

(12:50):
back home, they're just the foot soldiers They're not to
be written off. They are dangerous people breaking the hell
out of some laws, but they're not the brains of
the operation. That distinction belongs to someone else entirely. While
the militia member in the ranger stack is broadcasting her
movements on zello, there's a man standing nearby, a safe

(13:16):
distance back from the violence. His name is Omer Stewart Rhodes,
and he's the leader of the largest militia group in America,
which just so happens to be the most extensively prosecuted
paramilitary organization related to the January six riots. To understand

(13:36):
his organization and what it's capable of, we need to
understand the man. It's time to meet Stupard Rhodes. His
involvement is exactly what I thought it would be. I
knew he would never go inside the capitol. He's sort

(13:57):
of the the leader that stands him back and ends
he's gonna lead, and then hangs back. This is Tasha Adams,
the estranged wife of Stewart Rhodes. I'm stating the obvious here,
but Tasha is not an impartial source when it comes
to Rhodes. As I record this, she's running a go
fund make campaign to get money to pay for her divorce.

(14:19):
She lives in rural Montana with her six children and
a lot of animals. I think some of the noise
interruption might be my chickens. Tasha met Stewart in Las
Vegas in nineteen She was an eighteen year old dance
instructor and one day a twenty five year old Stewart
Rhodes came in for a barn dancing lesson. He's all stiff.

(14:45):
At this point, Rhodes had already served in the U. S.
Army and was now a commercial artist making sculptures for
local casinos. He was really assertive, almost kind of aggressive,
and personality me being to innately shy and quiet person
that was always something that I liked in, you know,

(15:06):
someone to date because it's sort of opened doors for me.
Stewart and Tasha lived in a tenerant life, starting a
big family, but always moving from town to town, job
to job. In two thousand eight, Rhodes took a job
working for the libertarian Ron Paul's short lived presidential campaign.
If we do the right things, we can restore the
greatness of this country. Thank you very much. He must

(15:29):
have liked something about it, because soon after the campaign flatlined,
Rhodes told Tasha that he wanted to form his own organization.
I thought, wow, this is something he can do for
a living where all he has to do is talk.
You know, this is something he can do. As Tasha
describes it, his way with words and his Yale degree
won him work easily enough. He just never saw it through.

(15:51):
Tasha figured that any job that just let him speak
would be a good thing for him. You know, he
grew up in a family of motivational speakers and ministers.
This is what they do in that family as they
give speeches and they they sell multi level marketing products
and they their reference and they love this stuff. This
is great, you know, something you won't get fired at.

(16:12):
Rhodes was indeed brilliant and evangelizing for his new organization,
and soon created a membership structure with annual fees, and
traveled the country and recruiting members. Our mission is simply
to reach out and remind all active duty military, police,
and firefighters of their civic obligation of their legal duty

(16:34):
and responsibilities under Article six of the U S Constitution.
It was amazingly immediate, he launched a free blog. He
wrote up a bit and it was almost instant, and
so in March of two thousand nine, the oath Keepers
were born. It was a pressure group campaigning for police
and military to keep the oaths that they'd sworn to

(16:54):
uphold the Constitution. He created a list called the Declaration
of Orders We will not bay Buist reads like a
big dog whistle to the conspiracy theory that Democrats were
planning to impose martial law and take everyone's guns. But
at the turn of the two thousand tens, Republicans were
catastrophizing that the newly elected President Obama was about to

(17:14):
send gun owners to the gulag, and Rhodes's message found
a willing audience. As the Oathkeepers grew and grew, Rhodes
masterminded their transition from being an advocacy group to a
straight up militia. If the people in this country were
to recognize the necessity of getting back to the Founder's plan,
the necessity of the well regulated militia being necessary for

(17:37):
security or free state, if they were to do that,
that were through a massive monkey wrench and the plans
of the globalist oligarchy. Because they want to sarm populations
that are easy to control. Under rhodes Is charismatic leadership,
the Oathkeepers grew to become one of the largest militias
in the country. They claimed to have over forty fee
paying members. But in two thousand fourteen, something seems to

(18:00):
have changed for Roads. His ex wife, Tasha links this
change to a meeting he allegedly had with the FBI.
His mental state spiraled fast after that, and that was
when we realized I had to get out of this.
Tasha doesn't know what the FEDS said to Stewart or
if the meeting was even related to his decline in

(18:20):
mental health, but after twenty five turbulent years of marriage,
having met Rhoads when she was just eighteen, she finally
woke up to the kind of man that he really was.
It was actually some of the books he had laying around.
He had a book in particular called The Sociopath next Door,
and I just sat down and read it, and it
felt like I just was drained of all life for

(18:41):
a minute, you know. Really, after I read that, it
just hit me and there was no way around it.
He's a sociopath. Tasha describes years, decades of feeling that
Stewart's abusive behavior was her fault. She would think that
maybe she just wasn't lovable, maybe she'd done something wrong
long and whatever issues he had could surely be loved away.

(19:03):
At long last, she decided the problem was not with her,
it was with her husband. Much of the abuse, Tasha
alleges was financial. Rhodes was paying himself a salary of
eighty thousand dollars a year to run the Oathkeepers, but
Tasha says that almost none of that money trickled back
to the family. We were really in a difficult place.

(19:25):
The disparity of how money was spent was just so odd.
We were just so used to it, you know, just
even little things like the kids and I only ever
shopped and thrift stores, but all his clothes were top
of the line expensive clothes. The kids would have holes
in their shoes, and you know, I think he had
fifty pairs of shoes, and all of them over a
hundred dollars each. I mean, just things like that. There

(19:46):
was physical abuse to Tasha says that Rhodes would sometimes
hurt her or even the kids, and then come up
with ludicrous excuses. I was just practicing my martial arts.
As far as we can tell, Rhodes has ever commented
publicly on Tasha's allegations, and they have not been proved
in a court of law. But as a relationship with
Rhodes deteriorated, Rhodes's public rhetoric became increasingly extreme. He developed

(20:12):
a working relationship with America's pre eminent conspiracy theorist, the
Info Wars host Alex Jones, and would often appear on
Jones's show to promote the Oath Keepers. Here he is
in calling for Donald Trump to deploy the military against leftists.
In the past have been opposed using the military domestically
for for this purpose, he needs to use the military.
We were worried about globalist using the military against us,

(20:34):
which is gonna happen. This is globalist overthrowing our government.
We better have the military stop the globalist. I mean,
you have to love it. Rhodes founded his organization out
of a fear that Democrats were going to use the
military to crush American freedoms. And now here he is
agitating for the U. S military to murder his political enemies.
And he wasn't just relying on Trump in the run

(20:56):
up to January six, Rhodes appears to have made plans
of his own. We have been already stationed outside d
C as a nuclear option, So I've got good men
on the ground already. We've been in a leadcon there
last week, and we're sorting out. We're gonna be staging
and we'll be there, will be inside d C. Will
also be on the outside of DC, armed, prepared to

(21:16):
go in. Rhodes is describing an armed paramilitary force lurking
outside of DC, ready to enter the city at his word.
This is a so called q r F, or quick
reaction force. The idea is that if Rhodes gets the signal,
a small group can bring weapons into d C and
distribute them to the unarmed oath keepers already present at

(21:38):
the capitol. You can only guess at the carnage that
might have ensued if dozens of oath Keepers had gotten
their hands on guns during the riot. On the day
of the insurrection, Info Wars host Alex Jones can barely
contain his excitement. Can you not feel history happening right now?
I mean, it's happening right now. It is, and we're
all we'll all need to realize that we're Americans, were

(21:59):
born in this country at the time. For this purpose,
we need to Stewart Rhodes clearly did not let go
of his fear on January six He never called in
the q r F. He never went into the Capitol
building either. At least twenty of his oath keepers have
since been arrested, some of them are looking at decades
in prison. In each of their indictments, someone called Person

(22:20):
one features prominently communicating with them all day on an
encrypted signal channel called d c op jan six one.
And you guessed it. Person one is believed to be
Stewart Rhodes. So will Rhodes eventually get picked up for
conspiracy to obstruct Congress or for the small matter of
plotting an armed coup? Time will tell Meanwhile, there's no

(22:49):
such ambiguity for his foot soldiers who entered the Capitol
on jan sixth, blissfully unaware of the trouble they were
storing up for themselves. Hey brother, we're boots on the
ground here. We're moving on to capital now. I'll give
you a booth on the ground update here. And I
wanted to know more about Rhodes as foot soldiers There's

(23:11):
been a lot written about them online, both vilifying and glorifying,
depending on where Google leads you. But I figured that
to get a read on them, i'd need to get closer.
My name is Danisa and I am the sister of
one of the domestic terrorists that tried to overtake the capital,
Donovan Kraw. Dennis's brother, Donovan Kraw, is a former marine

(23:35):
and a current oathkeeper. We heard his voice briefly in
the Zello recordings. Donovan comes first in the aftermath of
the riot. Donovan's picture went viral because he looked, you know,
like a scary guy. He was wearing a combat helmet,
ballistic goggles, and a tactical best and he was carrying

(23:56):
a handheld radio. What I wanted to know was how
does American citizen and a veteran reached this point? Where
does he come from? My parents were very young parents.
They were too young to be having children and be
My father was a raging alcoholic and very abusive. But

(24:17):
Donovan was kind of the protector, you know, he was
my older brother. Of course I idolized him. This makes
a change from Stuart Rhodes practicing karate on his own kids.
Donovan and Denisa grew up in Bushnell, Illinois, and Donovan
had a normal, fulfilling life, building a family, working in
a factory, coaching baseball, and he and Denissa stayed close.

(24:40):
I was a single parent and he was helping me.
He worked nights at a factory, and I, of course
worked days as a nurse, so he would watch my
daughter while I was at work, and I would keep
his daughter on the weekends. But in the two thousand tens,
Donovan went through a difficult worse. He lost his job

(25:01):
and he got addicted to alcohol and other substances, and
that wasn't the only major change in his life. One day,
Donovan had called me and we were just talking, and
just out of the blue, he says, I want you
to start saving gas and gas cans. I want you
to keep cash on hand at all times, and I

(25:21):
want you to get a map and draw a back
route to my house in case you have to leave
real quick and get to me. And I'm like, what
in the hell are you talking about, Donovan? Why would
I even need to do that. Donovan became a prepper,
someone who prepares for societal breakdown. His sister, Deniso wrote
it off as a drink fueled eccentricity, but it became

(25:43):
harder to ignore. We were having a family reunion and
we had it out at the property that Donovan lived
on because they could do target practice and whatever Neanderthal's do.
And I had walked up to the house to go
to the bathroom, and when I went into the bathroom,
I saw this magazine. It was a prepper magazine, something

(26:06):
like you put your food in thirty three gallon drums,
and very right wing magazine. So I made fun of him.
I took it out and I said, what is this bullshit?
I was concerned about the people he was hanging out with.
I had never heard of the oath Keepers. In case

(26:26):
you're not a regular listener, Dnisa is talking about the
sort of stuff you hear on Info Wars. It goes
like this. It's either President Trump is concouraged and bolstered
strengthened to do what he must do, or we wind
up in a holoody fight. We all know that the
fight's coming. I don't know what Donovan was watching or
what his online habits were, but it's clear that the
kind of far right message pushed by Stewart Rhodes and

(26:48):
others on Info Wars hit home at a hard period
in Krawell's life. He felt that Obama was a Muslim.
I think there were racists under tones that I had
never heard from him before. I mean, he fought in
the Gulf War next to all ethnicities, so this was

(27:09):
kind of something new to me, and I think that
is kind of an undercurrent of right wing media. You
might have guessed that Denis's politics aren't the same as
her brothers. The two drifted apart as Donovan latched onto
Donald Trump in and became increasingly immersed in a paranoid
world of conspiracy theories. I didn't put up with it,

(27:30):
where everybody else would just be like, yeah, yeah, just
to get him to shut up, I would tell him,
you're a moron. Think about what you're saying. I mean,
the mental gymnastics that he would have to do to
justify FEMA camps and Hillary eating babies and just all
of this stuff. It's just absolutely ridiculous. It was around

(27:52):
this time that Denis's relationship with her brother fell apart.
In two thousand and sixteen, Denisa went to a family gathering.
On first day she wore an I'm with her T shirt,
meaning she was going to vote for Hillary, and then
the second day, I wore a nasty woman T shirt
that went over not well at all. Sure enough, it's

(28:12):
set Donovan off, and the ensuing argument would be the
last time they'd speak for quite a while. In fact,
Denissa wouldn't hear Donovan's voice until January, when she heard
a now familiar clip on the news The Capol Donovan

(28:33):
Krowll is looking it up to twenty years in prison
for his part in the Rangers stack that preached the capital. Meanwhile,
Stewart Rhodes, Crowl's commander is a freeman. This could simply
be because Rhodes is so careful. Tasha describes a level
of paranoia that has no doubt served him well since
the insurrection. He's very, very aware of being recorded and

(28:55):
monitored at all times. He won't even talk in a house.
If he wants to have private conversation with someone, they'll
take off their smart watches, they'll take off their phones,
and they'll stand in the woods somewhere and talk under
the covers of trees so satellites can't read their lips.
Maybe that's why Stewart wasn't eager to do an interview
with me. But what if there's another explanation for his paranoia.

(29:17):
It was in two thousand and fourteen Natasha decided she
had to escape her marriage, and at around this point
Rhodes seemed to unravel following a secret meeting with the FBI.
Is it possible this meeting is the reason that he
hasn't gone to prison. I'm not sure what happened, but
he seemed to really melt down after that. And I
don't know if they threatened him with, you know, with

(29:39):
possible arrest, or if he made a deal with them
and possibly worked as an informant after that. I don't
know what happened, but he really melted it down after that,
and that became dangerous. Is Stewart Rhodes a federal informant?
It might explain why so many members of his organization
are in prison on conspiracy charges while the alleged chief
conspirator remains free. But people are starting to talk. When

(30:02):
Rhodes attended Sea Pack, one of the biggest conservative gatherings
of the year, in July, he was accosted by an
Alright media influencer, both keeper Guy right Hey fake for
your service. We'll love our federal informants. Oh, the macho
militia man is being mocked on a live stream, taunted

(30:22):
about being a federal informant. Explain why you haven't been yet?
There's no and you've avoid at all conspiracy charges so far.
The react of my ass right now, I want to
go outside and fight the fucking go fight. While Stewart
Rhodes defends his honor at Sea Pack, Donovan Crowell waits

(30:43):
for the justice system to decide his fate. His sister,
Danissa feels like her brother has been used and discarded.
I don't know where he goes from here. I just
I don't know. I missed my brother. Denisa has spoken
to don open once or twice since his arrest by
the FBI in January. To me, at least the way

(31:05):
she describes it, their interactions leave open a possibility of
the kind of redemption simply not possible for a man
like Stuart Rhodes. I said, Donovan, I love you. What
are you doing here? He said? We used to have
each other's back, and I don't understand how you know
what happened, But I love you too, and you know

(31:29):
I saw a little bit of the old Donovan, but
the old Donovan never lasts long. Donovan and Denis's mother
died of cancer in August. When she was on her deathbed,
she would have occasional phone calls with her eldest son.
When Donovan would call her when she was in the hospital,
all he would do was rail against the medical establishment

(31:51):
and saying all she needed was hydrogen peroxide. My mom
would just essentially set the phone down or say she
had to go because he would get fired up talking
about how not to take the vaccine and that the
hospital was trying to kill her. The oath Keepers have

(32:14):
gotten a lot of attention in the months since the
Capital riot, but when it comes to militia's in the
United States, Stuart Rhodes and his oath Keepers are just
the start of the story. The malicious scene is highly fragmented,
with hundreds of groups constantly forming and splintering, some with
three or four members and many with dozens of people involved.

(32:34):
This depressing prospect makes me think back to the Zelo
audio that Hampton Stall recorded on J six. For all
the funny stuff about hot wiring, snowplows and playing with
Biden's leg hair, there were a few voices in the
chat that sounded like they meant business. At some point

(32:57):
during the riot, a mysterious General E drops by his
moniker and obvious play on the Confederate General Robert E.
Lee General stop the still j six. General E proceeds
to sketch out a plan for continuing the campaign on
January seven. The premise is far fetched, but it does

(33:17):
sound like he has equipment and manpower. First thing in
the morning, we are heading out in a convoy. We
have armored vehicles coming from Texas, North Texas, South Texas.
We will be moving in a convoy up to d
C the next two and a half days. We're going
to meet in a sibyl at the Virginia river line.
All Detrious and Melissa man need to report to the

(33:39):
river on the Virginia side. We will be assembling there
and we'll be taking our capital back. The good General's plan,
of course, is utter madness, but so is the Capital riot.
And there are voices in the group who sound like
they want to sign up. Generally, this is uh Gator,
even if it is someone called ead. Our group wants

(34:02):
to link up with you and move in. If you
could please contact me. You have my number and Gator
isn't the only voice Jones in for treason. General E uh,
this is bad Land's actual I just sent a request
on Zello. Can you side Porch please? Now? This second

(34:24):
attempt at a coup never materialized. Within twenty four hours
of the Capitol Riot, d C was flooded with National
Guard troops who embedded there for weeks. So we'll never
know whether our General E and company would have gone
through with their tough talk. But when it comes to
domestic terrorism, I'm usually inclined to take people at their word.

(34:45):
So the million dollar question remains, what can we do
about these guys? Here's Hampton Stall. I don't think that
the FBI or DHS or whom have or else is
going to be able to like shoot their way out
of this problem. I don't think they're going to be

(35:06):
able to jail their way out of this problem. I
don't think they're gonna be able to like no knockerate
their way out of this problem. Of like militia involvement
in the United States, it could be termed as a
hyper low level insurgency at this point, and I think
a security approach will only serve to escalate that insurgency
into like, very real like violence. So I'm not sure

(35:28):
it's going to be as effective as everybody's hoping. The
idea that a bunch of disparate militias armed with a
motley assortment of rivals could present a threat to the U.
S Military is often mocked by liberals. It shouldn't be.
On January six, some of these people were seconds away

(35:49):
from potentially capturing elected leaders, and god knows what might
have happened. Then, when we write these groups off as
y'all Kaida country bumpkins doomed to lose any fight they start,
we're allowing our own biases to blind us to a
very real threat. World history is filled with small groups
of armed and motivated people who, through a mix of

(36:11):
daring and blind bravado, changed the world, often for the worse.
Perhaps the most frightening thing about people like Rhads isn't
that they might overthrow the government or even start the
civil war that many of them fantasize about. It's the
fact that they have increasingly deep ties two elected leaders
on the right. Imagine what might happen if these people

(36:32):
find themselves supported and empowered by an administration all too
happy to cut them loose against the enemies of the people.
It's happened before in Germany, Rwanda, Bosnia, and a thousand
bloody little conflicts all over the globe. There's nothing written
in the stars that says it can't happen here. Next time,

(36:59):
we're going to look at a very different activists from
Stewart Rhodes, a militant whose weapon of choice is memes.
An l a rapper addicted to online engagement who served
the social media algorithms, cruising through music and politics before
finally reaching the capital with an outrageous plan in mind.
Hey let's call Trump. Let's call Trump yet, so join

(37:22):
me in episode four as we meet the guy that
everyone overlooked, including myself, with dire consequences,