A writer for the Atlantic all but predicted the Insurrection based on a long interview with Rhodes that became this piece, released about the time Trump said Proud Boys should "stand back and stand by."
A PRO-TRUMP MILITANT GROUP HAS RECRUITED THOUSANDS OF POLICE, SOLDIERS, AND VETERANS
An Atlantic investigation reveals who they are and what they might do on Election Day.
Worth the read, but a few quotes about Rhodes and "patriots" and Trump"
"Rhodes had been talking about civil war since he founded the Oath Keepers, in 2009. But now more people were listening. And whereas Rhodes had once cast himself as a revolutionary in waiting, he now saw his role as defending the president."
"In August, when a teenager was charged with shooting and killing two people at protests over police brutality in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Rhodes called him “a Hero, a Patriot” on Twitter.
As Trump spent the year warning about voter fraud, the Oath Keepers were listening.
Rhodes was a little-known libertarian blogger
Republicans had spent eight years amassing power in an executive branch now occupied by Barack Obama. The time for politics was ending. “Our would-be slave masters are greatly underestimating the resolve and military capability of the people,” Rhodes wrote.
He volunteered for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign that year.
When Trump warned of civil war, Rhodes voiced his assent. “This is the truth,” he wrote. “This is where we are.”
Here Rhodes was drawing from the “New World Order” theory, a worldview that is central to the Patriot movement
on conservative talk radio, where they were met more favorably; and on The Alex Jones Show, where he was featured so often that he and Jones became friends.
In Trump, the Patriot movement believed it had an ally in the White House for the first time.
In 2016, when Trump had warned of election fraud, Rhodes put out a call for members to quietly monitor polling stations.
When Trump warned of an invasion by undocumented immigrants, Rhodes traveled to the southern border with an Oath Keepers patrol.
He sent members to “protect” Trump supporters from the protesters at his rallies
When Trump warned of the potential for civil war at the start of the impeachment inquiry last fall, Rhodes voiced his assent on Twitter. “This is the truth,” he wrote. “This is where we are.”
Virginia was a microcosm of the far right’s fears for the 2020 election: a swing to the left followed by an immediate push for gun control that would be the starting point for a wider assault on American freedoms. Many current and former Oath Keepers told me that gun rights were what had inspired them to join the group
Trump was stoking the idea that conservatives are a minority threatened by a demographic tide that will let liberal cities dictate the terms for the rest of the country. When I asked Rhodes and other people on the militant right to name concerns beyond gun rights, they mentioned how history is taught in schools, or how the Green New Deal would threaten land use, agriculture, single-family homes. They stressed that America is a republic, not a democracy. Liberals, Rhodes told me, want to see “a narrow majority trampling on our rights. The only way to do that is to disarm us first.”
Like Trump, Rhodes relentlessly demonizes Black Lives Matter activists as “Marxists”—a foreign enemy.
And he dwells on imagined threats from undocumented immigrants and Muslims that fit his ideas about a globalist push to undermine Western values.
Rhodes said I should investigate militant groups on the left such as the John Brown Gun Club, and seemed obsessed with antifa
His comments became more inflammatory as he began to warn about antifa and protesters. “They are insurrectionists, and we have to suppress that insurrection,” he said. “Eventually they’re going to be using IEDs.”
