Chino Valley, AZ — Jim Arroyo arrived for our assembly at Lucy’s Bar and Grill—dwelling of the “finest badass burger on the town”—carrying an Oath Keepers hoodie, a baseball hat, and a bracelet. He’s a brief, stocky man with a white beard, who walks with a stick. He had a pistol strapped to his waist and was accompanied by his spouse Janet.
The 2 run the Yavapai County Preparedness Crew, a company spin-off of the Oath Keepers militia that they fashioned within the aftermath of January 6, 2021.
Arroyo tells me he’s been prepping the members of his group for civil battle following the election. (He claims membership exceeds 1,000; WIRED was unable to independently verify this. The Rumble channel for his group has almost 350 subscribers.)
“The election can definitely set off a civil battle, no completely different than it occurred in any variety of international locations around the globe,” Arroyo says over pastrami on rye, fries, a facet of horsey sauce, and occasional. “I am coaching individuals to outlive a civil battle, to get out of the way in which, to remain dwelling, keep off the grid, have sufficient provides.”
The couple is satisfied that there’s a grand conspiracy to forestall Trump from turning into president once more. “They wish to take him out in order that he can’t get again within the White Home,” says Jim Arroyo. WIRED spoke to the Arroyos on the eve of the election to get perception into how he views the potential for violence within the days to come back, how he’ll react, and who he thinks will fireplace the primary photographs.
Paramilitary teams have lengthy leveraged fantasies about impending pure disasters or home conflicts to impress their members. Arroyo and his spouse say they practice members for all types of occasions, resembling financial collapse, assaults on {the electrical} grid, civil unrest and World Conflict 3. However the focus on civil war by paramilitary and anti-government teams has been notably intense this 12 months main as much as the election. A latest intelligence memo reported by WIRED warned that civil battle rhetoric on-line was radicalizing people in the direction of violence.
Within the aftermath of January 6, for which dozens of Oath Keepers, together with founder Stewart Rhodes had been arrested, the paramilitary motion scrambled to distance itself from the stigma of the occasion—even the phrase “militia.” The Oath Keepers, as soon as probably the most outstanding militia group within the U.S., basically collapsed. Based on the Southern Poverty Regulation Heart, the number of chapters dropped from 70 in 2020 to simply 5 in 2020.
Arroyo, like many others within the paramilitary motion seeking to distance themselves from the stigma of January 6, provided a sanitized view of the Yavapai County Preparedness Crew. “We’re an academic group,” he claims.
Arroyo broke ties with the primary Oath Keepers group, and fashioned “The Oath Keepers of Yavapai County,” an impartial group below the umbrella of the Yavapai County Preparedness Crew, a corporate nonprofit Arroyo founded over a decade ago. “It’s all the identical primary program,” Arroyo mentioned. It additionally contains the Lions of Liberty, the group’s political arm, which deliberate poll drop field stakeouts in the course of the 2022 midterms however agreed to stand down their operations earlier than election day following a authorized problem.
