FILE - Stewart Rhodes, founder of the citizen militia group known as the Oath Keepers speaks during a rally outside the White House in Washington, on June 25, 2017. Rhodes formally launched the Oath Keepers in Lexington, Massachusetts, on April 19, 2009, where the first shot in the American Revolution was fired. in U.S. history, before his Oath Keepers stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Stewart Rhodes was a promising Yale Law School graduate.
“He saw this titanic struggle between people like him who wanted individual liberty and the government that would try to take away that liberty,” said Matt Parry, who worked with Rhodes as a clerk for Arizona Supreme Court Justice Mike Ryan. Rhodes, Jessica Watkins, Thomas Caldwell, Kenneth Harrelson and Kelly Meggs are the first Jan. 6 defendants to stand trial under a rarely used, Civil War-era law against attempting to overthrow the government or, in this case, block the transfer of presidential power.
Rhodes was born in Fresno, California. He shuttled between there and Nevada, sometimes living with his mother and other times with grandparents who were migrant farm workers, part of a multicultural extended family that included Mexican and Filipino relatives. His mother was a minister who had her own radio show in Las Vegas and went by the name Dusty Buckle, Adams said.
Adams’ family had set aside money for her to go to college, but after their wedding Rhodes decided he should be the first to attend school. He told her she would need to quit her job teaching ballroom and country dancing and instead support them both by working full time as a stripper so he could focus on doing an excellent job in school, according to Adams. They married, but she found stripping degrading and it clashed with her conservative Mormon upbringing, she said.
After finishing college at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Rhodes went to work in Washington as a staffer for Ron Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican congressman, and later attended Yale, with stints in between as an artist and sculptor. Paul did not respond to a request for comment. “We know that if a day should come in this country when a full-blown dictatorship would come or tyranny, from the left or from the right, we know that it can only happen if those men, our brothers in arms, go along and comply with unconstitutional, unlawful orders,” Rhodes said in his Lexington speech, which didn't garner any news coverage.
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