An Oath Keeper Talks Civil War Over Pastrami on Rye

November 5, 2024:

Chino Valley, AZ — Jim Arroyo arrived for our meeting at Lucy’s Bar and Grill—home of the “best badass burger in town”—wearing an Oath Keepers hoodie, a baseball hat, and a bracelet. He’s a short, stocky man with a white beard, who walks with a stick. He had a pistol strapped to his waist and was accompanied by his wife, Janet.

The two run the Yavapai County Preparedness Team, a corporate spin-off of the Oath Keepers militia that they formed in the aftermath of January 6, 2021.

Arroyo tells me he’s been prepping the members of his organization for civil war following the election. (He claims membership exceeds 1,000; WIRED was unable to independently confirm this. The Rumble channel for his group has nearly 350 subscribers.)

“The election can certainly trigger a civil war, no different than it happened in any number of countries around the world,” Arroyo says over pastrami on rye, fries, a side of horsey sauce, and coffee. “I’m training people to survive a civil war, to get out of the way, to stay home, stay off the grid, have enough supplies.”

The couple is convinced that there is a grand conspiracy to prevent Trump from becoming president again. “They want to take him out so that he can’t get back in the White House,” says Jim Arroyo. WIRED spoke to the Arroyos on the eve of the election to get insight into how he views the potential for violence in the days to come, how he will react, and who he thinks will fire the first shots.

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. But 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.

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