An Oath Keeper Talks Civil War Over Pastrami and Rye

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Paramilitary groups have long leveraged fantasies about impending natural disasters or domestic conflicts to galvanize their members. Arroyo and his wife say they train members for all sorts of events, such as economic collapse, attacks on the electrical grid, civil unrest, and World War 3. However, the focus on civil war by paramilitary and anti-government groups has been particularly intense this year leading up to the election. A recent intelligence memo reported by WIRED warned that civil war rhetoric online was radicalizing individuals toward violence.

In the aftermath of January 6, for which dozens of Oath Keepers, including founder Stewart Rhodes, were arrested, the paramilitary movement scrambled to distance itself from the stigma of the event—even the word “militia.” The Oath Keepers, once the most prominent militia organization in the US, essentially collapsed. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of chapters dropped from 70 in 2020 to just five in 2020.

Arroyo, like many others in the paramilitary movement seeking to distance themselves from the stigma of January 6, offered a sanitized view of the Yavapai County Preparedness Team. “We’re an educational organization,” he says.

Arroyo broke ties with the main Oath Keepers organization and formed “The Oath Keepers of Yavapai County,” an independent group under the umbrella of the Yavapai County Preparedness Team, a corporate nonprofit Arroyo founded over a decade ago. “It’s all the same basic program,” Arroyo said. It also includes the Lions of Liberty, the group’s political arm, which planned ballot drop box stakeouts during the 2022 midterms but agreed to stand down their operations before election day following a legal challenge.

Arroyo said that there’s been an effort to revive the national network, via a new outfit called Oath Keepers USA. He claims that they tried to recruit him, but he declined because membership required expensive background checks and $70-a-year membership fees. “We have lost contact with everybody,” says Arroyo. “Everybody kind of went underground after what happened because of the fear of getting arrested for just being a member of the Oath Keepers, which was nonsense.”

He also claims to work closely with Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes and says many of the Yavapai County Preparedness Team members are part of the sheriff’s different “posses,” including his ham radio posse, his mounted posse, and the volunteers-in-protection posse, who are armed and can be relied on to back up the deputies if needed. (Rhodes did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) A 2022 report by the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting called Arizona “ground zero” for the constitutional sheriff movement, which has extensive ties to anti-government and paramilitary groups. That report found that more than half of Arizona’s 15 county sheriffs were “at least partially aligned” with constitutional sheriffs.

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Original Author: David Gilbert, Tess Owen | Source: Wired