“Stewart liked to look like someone willing to square up and fight in the streets and fields of America, when it came down to it, he was always behind police lines, just toeing the legal line and never actually leading the charge into the fray. And thankfully so.
“I believe that the more extreme elements, like the Proud Boys, saw through this image Stewart tries to portray very quickly and saw him as a poser in that regard.”
a fascinating, although rushed (written over five-months if I recall correctly) trove of information from an ex-member of the Oath Keepers – “ageing punk-rock journalist” – Jason Van Tatenhove.
Weather Tatenhove was a mole, or a figure who genuinely quaffed the kool-aid, he ended up working closely with the movement’s then leader – Stewart Rhodes – coordinating & producing media content on behalf of the “anti-government militia organization” & attending many of it’s events & “standoffs” before becoming thoroughly disenchanted with the whole affair.
He would go on to testify at the Select Committee to Investigate the Jan 6th Attack on the United States Capital.
“Stewart Rhodes and the Oath Keepers insert themselves into crisis, situations that they would not usually have any part of, and seek to make themselves relevant and fundraise on the backs of these conflicts to increase the membership rolls.”
Tatenhove is a very intriguing character, an artist & graphic designer with an affinity for Punk & HC, a former MMA fighter, & a subcultural wallower, he makes a highly droll witness to the militia/white nationalist/extreme libertarian/Incel/male supremacist/alt-right/neo-Nazi panjandrum.
“Who are the hang-arounds’?”
“Well, we have quite a few homeless people or those just plain crazier than the rest. We had to kick them out. Some of them are just a little too radical. Nazis and crazies that want to do crazy things. We had to kick out a young couple just the other day.”
“Are there a lot of these ‘hang-arounds’?”
“Not too many, but their dangerous and say stupid shit in front of the cameras. It’s better getting them out of here and on their way before they cause trouble.”
Indispensable to those with a stake in the subject, the book otherwise seems to suffer from speed as a stand alone, on account of it being penned in haste (perhaps to coincide with the trial).
It’s not poorly written, but it does often exhibit a kind of incongruence that would appear to derive from expedition (probably to coincide with the Senate Hearings).
Although vivid & accurate, it lacks the kind of gripping keenness & flow of Ken Croke & Dave Wedge’s Riding with Evil or the blistering forensics of Andy Campbell’s – We Are Proud Boys.
All the same, it is another essential firsthand examination on the sore festering at America’s throat.
“There are also blasting caps nearby. I am doing my best to keep an eye on these guys circling through, but there are some real yahoo young gun types around here. I have concerns about what may walk away while I am down on front gate duty.”
“Yeah, that could be bad.”
Among the hulk of reporting & firsthand accounts from Jason, which includes the Sugar Pine standoff, the White Hope standoff, & the Malheur Occupation, we get a lot on Stewart Rhodes.
And it’s dire.
“I do not feel that Stewart, personally, is a racist. He is an opportunist, one who seems to have, over time, begun to have no real qualms with networking with networking with those who are actual racists and white nationalists. There was no moral anchor when it came to relationships of convenience.”
Rhode’s is really depicted as a washed-up shyster & conman, an “opportunist” & grifter who regularly has to hide from factions of his own organization & the like who dismiss him as a “coward” & a “traitor”.
His fondness for barbecue, bombast, boozing, & an odious habit of “old army buddies” wives paints an extremely sorry picture.
“Stewart, on the other hand, would show up to a few of the trainings, hang out with the guys putting them on, and even make a show of all the tactical gear he had brought, but I don’t think I ever saw him once actually take part in training. He would talk for hours, often delaying the start of the class, and then stay in a local motel room he had booked, leaving everyone else to rough it through the days and nights, and good and bad weather.
Unreliable, often truant, & prone to disappearing on the job with any loose woman on the go for sordid alcohol soaked benders, Rhodes comes across as a shabby & extremely undisciplined leader, constantly in conflict with elements of his own movement (he is frequently expelled or barred from various events by opposing sections of the Oath Keepers).
Whilst the rest of the team camp out on site, Rhodes prefers to stay in hotels, far away from the front.
“Ex-girlfriends have also come forward to speak about how he would raise funds for veteran groups at events like that one but never pay a cent to the organization he was raising the money for.
I wish I could say this was an isolated incident. But I do not believe that to be the case; I think this type of grift is, to a large degree, a common practice in groups like the Oath Keepers.”
Happy in front of the cameras, Tatenhove attests that he never once saw Rhodes participate in the military training exercises. Bullshitting, BBQ, drinking alcohol, smoking “pot” (away from the more disciplined men of course) & messing with any tale on offer seems to have been Rhodes’s priority.
Just look at the man’s gut.
& the eye-patch was the cause of a self-inflicted firearms accident, not the result of some heroic gun battle with the FBI.
Tatenhove also reveals that Rhode’s personally pockets much of the donations & even “stiffs” members of the base.
For a man that shills for $ump, the greatest fraudster & scammer of all time, is this at all surprising?
“I came from New England and drove over three thousand miles to be here. Stewart called out us Oath Keepers to come and protect the family, camping out here in the dirt and the wind, and he’s been staying at a hotel and eating steaks every night. He’s not here protecting the Bundys. He’s here to grandstand, get in front of cameras, and get more donations.”
“ – , things have gotten heated, there have been fights, and guns were almost drawn.. If I were Stewart, I would, I would come back. Right now, he’s been labelled a coward and a traitor.”
“This is desertion that was done! This is a dereliction of duty that was done!”
“Did you know that the Josephine County Oath Keepers broke with the National?”
“Let’s say that our goals didn’t align with Stewart’s. We wanted to get shit done, and Stewart seem’s more interested in getting in front of the cameras and raising money.”
Stewart Rhodes’s horrific terrorizing of his own family, as his own wife & son have publicly detailed, is absent here (Tatenhove does not at all dispute the families claims, but simply says that he did not personally witness it).
Clearly Rhodes did not “keep his oath” to his wife.
“Throughout hours of interviews, in tweets and in posts on their blogs, Dakota and Tasha recounted numerous similar incidents of verbal abuse and neglect. A few stood out – like the time Dakota described Stewart choking one of his sisters on the family’s front porch.”
“Until I was an adult man,” he said, “I lived absolutely under the thumb of an emotional terrorist.“
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-63709446
Once again, what kind of movement would nominate or tolerate for a leader a man that maltreats his own family so horrendously?
How does that correlate to all the spiel about “traditional family values” that are supposedly the backbone & objective of these movements?
Who are we fucking kidding here? These are the biggest bullshitters, liars, frauds, cheats, charlatans & fuck-ups on Earth.
The proof now snaking mile-upon-mile into the horizon, the farce is not even worth the ink.
Low-level-fraudster-scum.
Jason Van Tatenhove, 2023, Skyhorse Publishing, 197-pages