Loudmouse

Stewart's Stolen Valor Bestie and the Matching Tattoo

An odd trait of the deeply narcissistic is a deep, seemingly inexplicable gullibility. At first brush it's completely backwards that someone with a natural drive to manipulate and deceive, especially someone actually talented at it like Stewart, would be susceptible to being manipulated; this focuses only on the manipulation and deception and not on the reality-denying self centered nature of people like Stewart. Believing that you are a golden god, the best and smartest boy, carries with it an assumption that no one else is sharp and quick enough to pull one over on you. Ego can become its own kind of naivete, and one that resists learned experience a lot longer than wide-eyed innocence. It's not an easy weakness to miss in a potential mark, and not difficult to exploit.

Note that I'm not even talking about being swindled by militia grifters within Oathkeepers, or even weird MLM schemes like Tangy Tangerine; Stewart got swindled repeatedly by those types to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but also by far less sophisticated shysters like trinket sellers at the mall and telemarketers. I had an early education in recognizing the working huckster, especially when it became my family 'job' to keep Stewart from impulse spending on my behalf with money we didn't have. Slip once, look too long at a kiosk selling a 150 color marker set on Las Vegas' Freemont Street and alert the salesman to a little boy with an easy mark of a father in tow, and you get to experience a week of everyone in the house crying and fighting over not having enough money for food while clutching your stupid overpriced makers. It's not hard to fall into responsibility when everyone in your life demands to know why you fell for the shallow sales pitch and made your father spend the last of the limited money on a toy helicopter.

Unfortunately, that job got a lot harder when it came to every other type of grifter that would come into Stewart's orbit in Oathkeepers. Stewart was constantly paranoid about nefarious forces out to get him, the Oathkeepers board of directors and state chapters plotting against him, but when Stewart made a snap judgment that he liked someone he became utterly incapable of seeing anything wrong with them for months on end. His inner circle constantly hosted users, shifty characters who likely actually were government informants, and at least one white supremacist infiltrator who posted on Stormfront about his efforts to steer the organization, all utterly above his suspicion while he imagined knives everywhere else.

It might seem bizarre, but in my opinion the cause is deceptively simple: Stewart is completely incapable of believing he's being swindled, at least until well after the fact. Stewart can see plots and dark deception everywhere when it comes to people he already distrusts, generally anyone who's a threat to his power, but developing suspicion of his favorites is an admission of fault that he cannot stomach until the swindle is well in the past and therefore easier for him to dismiss. The worst were the people I called his Pedestal Boys, adopted Golden Children that would fall into his favor, be given some Oathkeepers position, enjoy the favor of Stewart's intense man-crush for about 6 months in which they could do no wrong, and then be burned and disowned viciously whether they'd earned it or not.

The cycle was similar but less intense for just about everyone else in his life, being in Stewart's good graces means you're on a running timer to a fall that's just as dramatic as your rise regardless of what you actually do. Most of the time, the actual thieves and informants in the org would persist until the natural freeze and thaw cycle of Stewart's affection purged them out, and some responsible adult, usually Jim Ayala, would assess the damage once they were gone.

In some cases, the Pedestal Boys that did the most damage weren't even thieves or Feds at all, but simply insane. The depth of Stewart's inability to see fault in his association extended to not being able to recognize when someone is off their rocker, which is baffling unless you see it in the context of the cycle. A gullible org leader who falls for slick con men and trained handlers is easy to understand, but one who extends the same unthinking trust to someone who's unsteady even by the standards of a feverishly paranoid militia far less so. It doesn't matter, once Stewart selects a favorite the cycle has to finish in its own time.

This is how Oathkeepers ended up running around in the Arizona desert, following first wave Q-anon theorist Screwy Louie on his quest to uncover child sacrifice bones like boy scouts on the world's worst camping trip while I was preoccupied with the beginning of my serious escape planning.

This is how I knew, the first time I saw Mouse Prosen stand up at an OK event and launch into his hurried, shouting, incoherent speech, that we were going to be stuck with Mouse for a while.

The Jeffrey 'Mighty Mouse' Prosen I knew was a short, somewhat round, heavily muscled man with no concept of inside voice, pausing in his speech, or having a conversation that he did not steer onto the tragedy in his life. Every interaction was a breakneck-paced read through of his script for relating every single thing to his humble sacrifice and patriotism with quavering emotion. Mouse is the kind of guy who tries to crush everyone with an over-enthusiastic handshake in a dominance display, as opposed to the guys who feel like they're simply made out of welded rebar and concrete by nature and don't intend to squish your frail fingerbones. Mouse made a lot of claims about his career as a Marine Corps sniper, a Gunnery Sargent, a warrior who lost friends in battle and was wounded when his helicopter was shot down overseas. Stewart was taken with him instantly, forgetting his rage at the last golden idol Oathkeeper he'd cast down and anointing the new one with golden light. They were soon effectively joined at the hip, despite every indication that something was clearly wrong.

I noticed odd inconsistencies in his helicopter crash story, having the chance to hear it several times over on the campaign-trail-ish circuits Stewart would make of supporter stronghold areas. The details stayed vague, but the implications frequently changed. The helicopter crash that took the lives of his friends was covered up by nefarious military brass in one version, in some tellings actually shot down by the opposing force in a training exercise when live rounds were accidentally loaded in Anti-Aircraft cannons. At other times, he spoke of his friend dying in his arms and a 'helicopter shootdown' in the same breath as talking about his brothers killed overseas, and his own deployment on a 'special tactical team,' to imply tragedy in combat.

Sometimes he was a sniper, other times only a 'marksman,' sometimes he lost his best friend in a tragic accident, and sometimes he lost a vague number of good men implied to be under his command in overseas combat, while in other tellings they were friends he lost to overseas deployments after he retired following a long career. None of these stories were definitive except for the basic strokes: Helicopter crash, injury, death of a friend, friends lost overseas, with everything else being heavily alluded to. More than outright contradictions between different stories, it was the elements of the same basic story being reshuffled with different emphasis to create many different impressions. The vagueness made specific lies difficult to call out, easy to explain away, and seemed to me like a technique that would be used by a very good liar.

Suspicious, I turned to a source no one in the upper echelons of Oathkeepers really bothered to consult: Google. A single search turned up a post on a Stolen Valor blog calling Mighty Mouse's story into question after he started making headlines with his classic car-centered healing journey, and revealing that he had in fact told many verifiable lies. He had never been a sniper, on a special tactical team, and there were no wars or aerial accidents in the 18 months (!) he spent in the Marines, with over a year of that in the hospital.

He had also apparently claimed to be a Gunnery Sargent at some points, a story I never saw him spin in person. Possibly he read the room and refrained from claiming to be a Gunny in a room full of dudes who would know what that actually meant, reserving that feather in the cap for more impressionable crowds. The malleability of his fake career seems over complicated, since it was built on blatant lies anyway, but hen you consider that no one until my humble self bothered to even check until he was already accepted in Oathkeepers, it shows a kind of insidious wisdom: By starting out with fake credentials that no one would ever check, then keeping his in-person story vague enough that he didn't trip any bullshit detectors, he was able to fly under the radar for a while. The oddities in his behavior and scattered life story are easily overlooked by people who have experience with traumatized veterans, and for good reason, allowing Mouse room to maneuver.

I have no idea if he ever made money off of his association with Oathkeepers or his many attention-grabbing antics, from speaking out for the Rebel Rag to blustering into a BLM office and standing guard outside recruiting stations, but he certainly got all the attention he could soak up. The ride wasn't ending any time soon either, when I went to Stewart the only response I got was “Send me the link.” Send me the link means to throw something into a black hole of Stewart's inbox, an elephant graveyard of emails with hundreds of thousands of unread messages from which nothing ever returns.

Not only did Stewart keep having Mouse headline events for Oathkeepers, they became ever more joined at the hip while he continued to simply ignore all the times I and others brought up that this guy was a proven fraud. The apex of the man crush went a step beyond most others, maybe as a kind of petulant reaction to people telling Stewart he was being fooled; Another Pedestal Boy, very likely a federal agent operating under a false name, also persisted in Stewart's bestie zone beyond all reason when people pushed him on it. To cement their eternal broship that would never not at all reflect badly on Stewart or the Org, he and Mouse got the trashiest matching tattoos they could think up on short notice: Skulls emblazoned with OK-III% across their sides, which had to be shown off to everyone in chest-bumping beer gut glory. I cannot find documented evidence, but I remember Mouse giving several speeches shirtless for the sake of the Ink.

Stewart, for his part, would get the crappy initial work touched up and added a matching “Til Valhalla” with another skull on the opposing side of his torso. He put this to good use one time that I can remember, when an enthusiastic militiaman and CPT leader hosting us at his apartment in Cour D'Alene started in about black activist groups rioting and how none of the black militants agitating for a race war were prepared for the Wrath of the White Man, which forced Stewart to step in and remind him that Oathkeepers couldn't say stuff like that. The conversation turned stilted and awkward until Stewart whipped off his polo shirt, at which the man's eyes lit up like a small child seeing an R.C. car and pronounced it “fucking sweet as fuck dude.”

There is no gripping climax to the story of Mouse Prosen, Stewart just eventually burnt out on him and lost interest, choosing to let this whole Stolen Valor thing be the reason and making ineffectual noises about how they should start actually background checking people. Considering that the first O.K. Treasurer had been a registered sex offender and background checks for national leadership still hadn't been mandated years later, I was not going to hold my breath. Just like every other momentary favorite, everyone just had to wait out Mouse's turn in the spotlight while his presence did continuous damage to the image and credibility of Oathkeepers, especially to the serious combat veterans that Stewart was trying to appeal to the most.

Probably for the best.