The Fall of Stewart Rhodes
What went wrong, and what does it mean for the rest of us?
If you are following the January 6 saga and don’t live under a rock, then you’re probably aware that Oathkeepers founder Stewart Rhodes was arrested on sedition charges last week.
It’s easy to jump on board the wagon of victimhood and rise to defend Rhodes. After all, he’s a solid patriot and therefore anything that the government does to him must by default be wrong—at least that’s what far too many people seem to be thinking.
Facts, however, matter. They matter far more than reputation or ideology or anything else, and in this case, it’s pretty easy to see exactly what went wrong. Rhodes and his group got infiltrated. The only real question is whether Rhodes knew or not.
Unpopular opinion: Rhodes and his cohorts are a perfect case study in how NOT to go about political action.
Let’s go way back before the events of January 6, 2021, and discuss the planning and setup.
Infiltrator(s) in their chats
On November 5, 2020—two days after the Presidential Election—RHODES sent a message to an invitation-only, end-to-end encrypted group on the application Signal, titled, “Leadership intel sharing secured” (“Leadership Intel Chat”), which, at that point, included [co-defendant] MEGGS and others. (from the charging docs)
Immediately we understand the first problem; either law enforcement got the messages from Signal itself, or it had a plant inside the group. The fact that the chat is in the charging documents verbatim means they had a copy of all the messages. Either law enforcement got it from Signal, or they got it from someone in the chat.
Signal prides itself on being able to only provide minimal information if subpoenaed. In 2016, for instance, a grand jury sent a subpoena for user data, and all Signal was able to send was the date they signed up, and when they last signed in.
More recently in October 2021, Santa Clara County law enforcement attempted to get information on a user from the company. From the Signal website:
As usual, we couldn’t provide any of that. It’s impossible to turn over data that we never had access to in the first place. Signal doesn’t have access to your messages; your chat list; your groups; your contacts; your stickers; your profile name or avatar; or even the GIFs you search for. As a result, our response to the subpoena will look familiar. It’s the same set of “Account and Subscriber Information” that we can provide: Unix timestamps for when each account was created and the date that each account last connected to the Signal service.
That’s it.
The tentative logical deduction, then, is not that Signal failed—it’s that there was an infiltrator in Rhodes’ leadership chat. Let’s keep going, and see if anything else in the charging documents supports or disproves that hypothesis.
Who Was Appointed as Operation Leader?
According to the charging documents, on November 9, Rhodes held a “private GoToMeeting…limited to Oath Keepers[sic] members, titled, “Oath Keepers National Call — Members Only,” which was attended by MEGGS, HARRELSON, WATKINS, HACKETT, and others, including a person whom RHODES appointed as the operation leader for January 6, 2021.” [emphasis mine]
The GoToMeeting was “limited to Oath Keepers members,” but according to the member roster (a small part of what was taken in a 2021 hack), even limiting it to “members only” could have still included anyone out of almost 35,000 people. Since it was invite-only for certain members, that shortens the list significantly but let’s be real: What are the odds that at least one person was on that call who, from a security standpoint, shouldn’t have been?
It’s obvious that there was a plant on all of these calls; the documents have several direct quotes of Rhodes from various meetings and calls, which means once again, law enforcement got a transcript or recording from someone who was there.
The thing that should jump out at you, however, is the statement that Rhodes “appointed” some unknown person “as the operation leader for January 6, 2021.”
Keep in mind that you’re reading a charging document in which many people are named. This document is literally providing the list of “bad things” that these people did, and the justification for charging them. Why wouldn’t they name the person in charge? Wouldn’t that person also be subject to charges considering they were leading the operational efforts that day? And why is that person’s name missing from the charging documents for others as well?
There is only one reason why they would NOT name that particular person—because that’s who the asset is. Naming them means outing them, and they don’t need/want to do that quite yet.
If you’ve sat through a class of mine or read The Mindset of Resistance, then you already understand the phases of an infiltration. The asset in this case isn’t named yet, and therefore can be re-used elsewhere. In fact, technically the person may not even need to change their name. They can simply use their experience as currency with a new group. After all, they were there. Many people in various groups eat that stuff up. No need for vetting; that person already put “skin in the game,” and therefore far too many people will simply roll out the red carpet. No one will ask the most basic question of all:
If you were the operation leader, how come you didn’t get charged too?
The best part is that getting charged doesn’t necessarily mean you weren’t in on it anyway. We saw that after Malheur and the Bundy Ranch.
We already know that law enforcement knows exactly who that person is; after all, they have transcripts of the call itself, and there’s a good chance they were provided by the person we’re talking about.
Who Was the Person with Rhodes in DC?
The documents mention an exchange in the Leadership Intel Chat in which “Oath Keepers affiliates” asked what Rhodes and his team “hoped would happen if they got inside the Capitol.” The next sentence is very important:
“A person with RHODES at the time responded, ‘We are acting like the founding fathers - can’t stand down. Per Stewart and I concur[.]’”
Who was that person? They obviously had enough clout in the group to answer for Rhodes himself; in fact, Rhodes then followed up with his own answer in agreement. Is that the operation leader? Again—law enforcement is well aware of who that person is. Why aren’t they charged or even named? Why, in fact, does there appear to be a concerted effort NOT to name them?
Why Would Rhodes Pick a Plant to Run the Operation?
This is another great question, and one where the answers are difficult for a lot of people to come to terms with. There are only two reasons why Rhodes would allow a plant to be on the call, or potentially be the person appointed as operation leader.
He didn’t know.
He did know, and did it anyway.
That’s it: either he knew he had at least one plant who was in the planning sessions, or he didn’t. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say he had no idea. Now we have more questions:
Why was anyone on that call (or any other) who wasn’t personally and completely vetted by Rhodes himself? If your answer is that Rhodes is too important/busy to do his own vetting, I’ll just stop you right there and say nope, wrong.
Why were enough people on the call for someone to fall through the vetting cracks? If you have too many people on a planning session for you to intimately understand every single one of them and who they are, what they want, etc., then you have too many people. If you’re of the opinion that your particular event needs numbers to work correctly, then you should be using a cell-based structure that protects members.
Who did he outsource his vetting to, and why? Don’t outsource your vetting. If you’re the one who’s going to be at risk, then you need to personally and completely vet every single person who you will have interactions with. None of this, “well, Jack vouches for him.”
Why would he be planning an operation of that type at all, let alone with people who he didn’t know? Let’s pretend that you’re doing some Great Thing(tm). Why would you shoot yourself in the foot before it even starts, by letting a whole bunch of people you don’t know and haven’t vetted yourself, into the inner circle of the operation?
There are more questions, but you get the point. Now let’s game out the other option and assume he did know he had infiltrators/assets in his planning sessions.
Why would he continue to allow them to be there? If you’re thinking, “well they weren’t doing anything wrong,” I’ll point out that yes, from a legal standpoint they absolutely were. Even if they were planning a quilting bee, you don’t allow infiltrators into your group in the hopes they get bored when they realize all you’re doing is quilting. That’s not how it works. Infiltrators don’t come in to “see” if you’re doing something wrong. If they can’t find you doing something, then they come up with something for you to do.
Why would he discuss and plan an operation involving violence knowing they were there? See point 1. If he knew, and still continued to plan an operation with the expectation of violence, then he is either redefining stupidity, or he is in on the greater effort and setting up his own people.
Why would he [possibly] make the plant the operation leader if he knew that’s what the person was? I don’t even need to explain this one, do I?
There are no good scenarios. There are no “perfectly good explanations.” The best-case scenarios involve massive security failures of the 101-level variety; the worst-case scenarios involve something a lot more sinister.
Why Was Any of This Planned Online?
Ask 100 patriots whether Rhodes’ plan for January 6th was justified, and you’ll get probably 50 different answers. That’s not what this article is about. I’m not looking to evaluate his perceived justification or choice of action, although anyone who knows me knows that I view January 6th on the same level as Malheur: poorly conceived, poorly planned, poorly led, and poorly executed…and frankly, it doesn’t matter what I think of his idea anyway, nor does it matter what I think of him personally.
What’s important today, in this article, is how it was planned, led, and executed. Why did it fail so spectacularly? If we can’t be honest about these things, then we will never be effective ourselves. If we can’t view the ‘big names’ through the glasses of realism—even if we held them on a pedestal at one time—then what’s the point? We’ll just keep making those same mistakes.
It doesn’t matter if Signal is trustworthy or not, either. Even if everything the Signal website says is true and there is zero way for your enemies, whoever they may be, to get access to your messages, you should still be exercising discretion. You certainly shouldn’t be putting actionable threats in a group chat when you don’t know and haven’t vetted the participants.
The last question I have for you is this: Why was any of this planned online, across states, across an unknown number of people, with zero real nods to anything remotely involving proper security? Again, it comes down to one of two scenarios: idiocy, or something worse.
Putting It All Together
It’s not my job to tell you if Rhodes’ actions were justified, and it doesn’t even matter if they were or not. What matters is how they were done, whether there were errors, and whether we can learn from those errors. Step out of the loyalty, step out of the emotion, and read those charging documents with some critical thinking. Ask the questions, because the answers—and whether you are willing to see them—will define your own activism effectiveness in the future.
OPSEC