Chino Valley, AZ — Jim Arroyo arrived for our assembly at Lucy’s Bar and Grill—residence of the “greatest badass burger on the town”—sporting 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 Group, a company spin-off of the Oath Keepers militia that they shaped 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 practically 350 subscribers.)
“The election can actually set off a civil battle, no totally different than it occurred in any variety of nations world wide,” Arroyo says over pastrami on rye, fries, a facet of horsey sauce, and low. “I am coaching folks to outlive a civil battle, to get out of the way in which, to remain residence, 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 return, how he’ll react, and who he thinks will hearth the primary pictures.
Paramilitary teams have lengthy leveraged fantasies about impending pure disasters or home conflicts to provoke their members. Arroyo and his spouse say they prepare members for all types of occasions, akin to financial collapse, assaults on {the electrical} grid, civil unrest and World Warfare 3. However the concentrate on civil battle by paramilitary and anti-government teams has been notably intense this yr 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 have 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 distinguished militia group within the U.S., basically collapsed. Based on the Southern Poverty Legislation Middle, the variety of chapters dropped from 70 in 2020 to only 5 in 2020.
Arroyo, like many others within the paramilitary motion looking for to distance themselves from the stigma of January 6, supplied a sanitized view of the Yavapai County Preparedness Group. “We’re an academic group,” he claims.
Arroyo broke ties with the principle Oath Keepers group, and shaped “The Oath Keepers of Yavapai County,” an unbiased group underneath the umbrella of the Yavapai County Preparedness Group, a company nonprofit Arroyo based over a decade in the past. “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 throughout the 2022 midterms however agreed to face down their operations earlier than election day following a authorized problem.
