There’s something very special about the moment that you fully realize how many conservative demagogues really do accuse everyone else of what they want to do, it tilts the entire world to one side as some things suddenly make sense and others become profoundly weird.
Constantly fearing that The Enemy will target conservative and Libertarian politicians for assassination because you always have your own murder plots on the back burner, that makes sense. Covering yourself in hidden knives because of Chuck Schumer? Weird.
Concealed knives are a staple of survivalist and militia culture, knife guys get profoundly cultish and often start fandom squabbles with gun nerds and martial arts enthusiasts over who is the most mean streets hardcore, and Stewart’s paranoia built on this to absurd levels: Stewart would at different times carry a folding knife with a 9 inch blade, a Bolo style machete that was about two feet long (if the hazy childhood memory is correct, he took that one into a movie theater), and smaller fixed blade or folding knives in other pockets. I was advised to carry a left-handed fighting knife so that I could draw from an unexpected side, all the hallmarks of thinking infected with Mall Ninja Logic that gives tactical importance to cool little quick draw techniques over being very well practiced at something basic.
In a different class, though, were the smaller hidden knives that Stewart kept on his person in a constantly shifting constellation: In the belt buckle, under the brim of his hat, in sleeves. He made a game of asking people to “guess how many knives are on Stewart today” and the number was always too low. This was fairly normal, Stewart always had different hidden cool guy secret weapons like the plastic Stinger punches for key chains, hats with bags of sand and lead shot in them, hats with little plastic spikes on them, hats with concealed metal, etc (the preoccupation with the hitting hats eventually made its way into the J6 conspiracy trial). The knives just seemed like a continuation of that.
It wasn’t until one day, while Stewart went through one of his usual descriptions of an elaborate self defense fantasy, that he said something that put his fixation on tiny knives into a weirder context. The knives, especially the brim of the hat and belt buckle ones, were his countermeasure for someone trying to come up behind him and strangle him in a public restroom. He would be able to spin around and slash them in an instant, without even having to reach for a place an attacker would expect to have a concealed weapon. He was extremely proud of himself, and gave the impression that getting an arm trapped and unable to self defense stab while someone strangled him at a urinal very specifically had been weighing on his mind for a while.
I nodded and kept my face blank, realizing somewhere deep inside that this was all about Chuck Schumer.
Let us go back to 1998, a year after my birth and so an event I would have no personal knowledge of. I do, however, have the benefit Stewart bringing up this anecdote roughly one million times and so can transport myself so vividly into Stewart’s imagined past that I can smell the hand soap and hear the buzz of fluorescent lights. Stewart was working as an aide for Congressman Ron Paul, the in hindsight shockingly sane vanguard of the radical takeover of the Republican party that was to come, and Chuck Schumer had just won a senate race against a NY incumbent Republican. I can only assume that he hit the ground running on pissing off conservatives because he had one solid hater.
Unfortunately, he might not have realized how serious that was.to some people.
For one brief golden moment, a window of time that Stewart would obsess over for decades to come and may be ruminating over in his cell even now, newly elected Chuck Schumer came over the Representatives offices to visit someone and ended up alone in a public bathroom with Stewart Rhodes.
Stewart weighed his options for seconds that felt like hours, judging that he probably could slip behind Senator Schumer and get him in a rear naked choke before he could scream for help. Stewart had been in the military and trained afterwards with the forefront of BJJ in America, he could take Chuck. The question is whether he would be able to get away with it, and leave the scene of the crime without being positively ID’d.
While he struggled over this last point, Chuck Schumer finished his government work and left.
The sense of lost opportunity would settle into Stewart like an ember and smolder for years.
There is, by the way, absolutely no way that Stewart would have gotten away with it. In the absence of all forensic evidence, there would still be only one outspoken weirdo with extensive martial arts training on the staff of the crazy Congressman with the Gadsden Flag in his office.
Unable to let reality get in the way of his murder daydreams, Stewart let the fantasy of what could have been fester in his mind. He told the story constantly, lamenting that he missed his shot, but may not have ever realized consciously that he was wearing 2/3rds of his knives out of fear of someone doing unto him as he wanted to do Chuck Schumer.
It would be easy to let the urinal assassination fade into the background of Stewart’s many paranoid fears, he would demand that I stand back to back with him at ATMs and when opening the front door of our house as that was the prime ambush window, he kept extra distance between himself and cars in front in case he had to swerve around and drive out of a shooting, and he once ripped down our address sign in Trego for fear of cartel assassins coming to get him in retaliation for Oathkeepers ‘border security’ operations.
I know better, the prospect of being strangled at a public urinal stayed as a weirdly consistent through line when all other paranoid fantasies would come and go. Because Stewart is a chronic projectionist, I got a window into how he wished he could kill Chuck Schumer in the imagined ways an attacker would try to take him while he was busy clearing the pistol: A garrotte, a length of piano wire, a shirt knotted up into a makeshift noose.
This has been on my mind lately for one reason, that it’s such a handy anecdote to bring to the table when I’m trying to explain to mainstream democrats how very not-fringe the right wing fringe is. Our MT congress critter Matt Rosendale could not have possibly been associated with Oathkeepers without hearing the usual conversation about the collapse, civil war, and guerrilla warfare against the United States government. Oathkeepers considered the US to already be in a cold civil war in which they were not yet allowed to kill their opposition, but struggling to politically shape the battlespace in their favor before the shooting began. It’s that way for most of the militia movement, but for Oathkeepers it started as far back as 1998.
So I ask that you consider this the next time a politician is trying to sell you a bill of goods on bipartisanship and centrism, and ask them if any pages or aids for those reasonable Republicans linger too long when they’re alone. Or they may be more sophisticated, and on their way to meet elsewhere with a paramilitary that recruits specialists like trained military snipers.
If you’re working in a building with the modern Republican party, at any level, you may need a bathroom defense knife. Not sure what I can say about the snipers though.
All I can think to say here is, "OUCH. My Brain hurts!" (Sorry, I sometimes resort to Monty Python tag-lines in the face of something so appalling...like what a horror your childhood was around Stewart.) Your profound sanity today continually amazes me, and it should do everyone else who reads your postings. Thank You.