The compound: An instantly conjured pop culture image, usually complete with armed guards and barbed wire fences. Often, though, the distinction is a little more unclear. Like the Supreme Court trying to define pornography, you know it when you see it.
When the community is homogeneous to the point that it plays with your eyes a little when you look at a crowd, everyone dressing and acting alike, just a little too tight knit and a little or a lot more closed off to outsiders than normal small town people, having only one road in or out, or when the entire community is owned only by members of a single radical church, you may be in a compound.
Another warning sign is when the pastor of the only town church is affiliated with efforts to train young men in Biblical war by an insane theocrat, or when you invite Stewart Rhodes to give a talk on why every church in America needs a sniper team to counter SWAT raids.
On the other hand, free cheesecake.
When we pulled up to Marble Country for its annual God and Country extravaganza in 2013, we were already joking in the car about being trapped if they blocked off the only road. I will say it was pretty common for Stewart to encourage mocking other people in the Movement as part of his general strategy of using psychological Triangulation on everyone and with everyone, all of the time, but Stewart cannot be completely blamed: We often made fun of the people around us all on our own.
Unlimbering outside of Marble Country proper, we were shown to guest cabins on a ranch and an accompanying kennel, where one of my younger sisters would sleep on a foam pad outside to avoid being separated from her new puppy overnight. In my memory an eerie vibe was already beginning to set in, but that may only be an artifact of hindsight. The people we stayed with were incensed over the latest gossip, that members of the “covenant community” had sold their property to outsiders and diluted the Church’s stranglehold on the area.
This was mildly eyebrow-raising, but having grown up in what I would call a ‘compound-friendly’ culture and steeped in the American Redoubt Movement and Freestate Projects, which aimed at strategic relocation to gain a majority in local politics, it didn’t raise too many alarm bells.
After a typically restless night sleeping far too many children on the crowded floor of a cabin, the first day dawned on God and Country.
Stewart had a full schedule on his hands, appearing on a roster of usual suspects to reinforce and perpetuating in-group beliefs and keep the background hum of fear and impending doom going. The lists blur together in my mind from event to event: A rotating cast of characters like Sheriff Mack, with his bizarre self-insert fanfiction short film about what he would have done if he had been the Sheriff called to arrest Rosa Parks; Jordan Page, whose Christian antiauthoritarian music rooted in deep anger at the Bush administration played very well to the crowd; Chuck Baldwin, with his sermons on how 501C3 Tax Exemption is a tool to stifle Christian resistance to the Antichrist; Brandon Smith of Alt-Market, (now a local-to-me Antivax/Antiwoke grifter and perennial pain in the ass) whose regular doomsaying about the economy, reading the Baltic Dry Index and other sources like a mystic reading disaster in cast knucklebones and tea leaves, did well to set up Stewart’s pitch; “You go and scare the hell out of them, and I’ll follow up with the solution.”
Stewart’s ‘solution’ was effectively a franchise militia, an old idea that would a year later become a central component of the Oathkeepers mission in the CPT Program: An initiative to start guerrilla cells in all but name across the country modeled somewhat after the US Army Special Forces concept and the Vietnam-era Marine Combined Action Platoon, building a succession of modular militias around a core of ex-military or police Oathkeepers who would be the leadership and training cadre, expanding tendrils into the surrounding community through fronts like neighborhood watches and disaster preparedness.
The idea was still incubating and not yet an official program, but the overall concept was very much present in Stewart’s speech. His audience was highly receptive, as I would learn later Stewart would be sharing a stage with right-wing supervillain Matt Shae and talking to a crowd that had long standing ties to Christian Identity terrorist groups. No one would be more receptive to being advised to be more militant, to fear a more imminent apocalypse, to confirm that America was imperiled by nefarious forces.
I got the gist of things secondhand and through prior experience with attending a million and one of these things, I have to say that I didn’t witness any of the big talks because I was too busy eating cheesecake.
As the God and Country festival began, my family was more or less turned loose in this eerily-too-picturesque country village that had been built out of a dusty ghost town. The subtext in our every interaction with Covenant Community leaders was that Stewart was being courted to move us into their isolated, guarded, exclusive community, which flattered Stewart to no end and incited him to tease that he might bite and buy in for our whole visit. To sweeten our stay, we’d been handed wads of meal vouchers for the vendor carts and trailers, distributed among the many children and currently in-favor Oathkeepers hangers-on that had carpooled with us. Having the run of a sizable outdoor convention instead of being hostage to appearances in a stuffy convention center or diner’s back room, we unanimously opted out of listening to the apocalypse talks and just wandered from food cart to food cart from sunup to sundown.
Our attitude was, verbatim, that we were always surrounded by crazy people of varying denominations in the Movement, but in this case we were also getting free food out of it and so would just make the most of things.
It was a very odd couple of days in that respect. There was always the awareness that we were in a tiny artificial town kept by and for crazy people in the middle of nowhere, but we also had the freedom to roam unsupervised inside the right-wing cult recruitment and extremist networking fair without being on display or under the weight of expectations. Every other event in our lives was purpose-driven, our role to reinforce Stewart’s image in front of Christian homeschoolers or 9/11 truther Vietnam Vet communes. Even at the less officious meetups and public events that my mother managed to get us to, despite our isolation, constant moving, and irregularly scheduled lives, we felt ourselves under the lens of mom’s desperate hope that we would be normal, socially adjusted, happy children and so prove that our home lives were alright after all. Everything was a performance, and so every outing was a test that we could and would fail.
Not so at the cult town. I meandered and made small talk with passing strangers using well-memorized soundbites and lines for impressing stoned Libertarians at campfires with my child genius, joined in the only volleyball game I have played in my life to date with airbrushed-looking magazine-cover Church Youth in painfully white athletic clothes, and let myself engage with other people in general without holding myself to any kind of success or goal-oriented thinking for socializing. I’m sure that I was odd, but knowing that we definitely were not moving into someone else’s compound when Stewart would only ever settle for having his own meant that I would never see any of these people ever again and impressions did not matter.
We would periodically check in with each other and mom as we made lazy time-wasting circles around the festival grounds, at one point I’d gotten bored and started improvising board games with lines in dirt and rocks with a gaggle of other children; mom saw a younger kid carrying a large flat rock we were using to scratch tic-tac-toe and a crude Risk board into saying “I’m looking for Dakota” and thought ‘yes, that checks out’ before continuing on to an espresso trailer.
I really only saw Stewart when we packed up at night, and briefly when I got conscripted into taking part in a Kali demo for a group of knife-fighting-inclined old church ladies. I caught none of Stewart’s talk until last year, when I finally circled back to it through facebook groups dedicated to monitoring extremists that had videos cut from the official God and Country Festival DVD. If I had stopped in, the crux of it being about killing federal agents with sniper rifles for Jesus would not have fazed me in the slightest. Hearing violence against the Feds being called for had become so normalized that it had faded to boring, repetitive background noise. Adapting the messaging of revolution to our surroundings only made sense.
One more thing of note did happen, almost as an afterthought as we walked out. While the goodbye handshakes were happening with organizers and the last bit of idle hunting that Stewart might be coming back to stay was being played out, Stewart was handed $400 in cash for his speaking fee. He certainly acted surprised in front of my mom, acting as if it were totally unexpected, but we wonder. How many times was Stewart ‘surprised’ by speaking fees? He certainly traveled to talk a lot, always giving the impression that he was doing it for free to promote Oathkeepers even when he headlined. He definitely did not hesitate to charge every expense to the Oathkeepers card when he was out, living large on his expense account and neglecting to turn in receipts.
Chances are, a lot of money changed hands that went somewhere where the rest of the family and Oathkeepers never saw it. Best case scenario, it helped pay for a sex worker’s night school, worst case it went to a shady dentist for a jumbo bottle of Hydros.
In any case, Stewart drove off into the sunset with a clear grifting opportunity in his rearview mirror. The environment was too stiflingly Christian for Stewart’s taste, who wanted a more 1960s-free-love sort of fear-driven End Times community to rule over. In this case his imagination failed him, it was not yet widely known how common it was for Christian leaders to get away with decades of sexual abuse of their congregation on top of rigorous financial fleecing. Marble Country would eventually snare Jordan Page, most likely when his wife sensed that the heyday of Oathkeepers paying their rent and promoting Jordan’s music was soon coming to an end, where as far as I know he remains to this day. That part I’m deeply sad about, since I personally thought very highly of Jordan and think he was probably hooked by exploitation of his genuine faith, a tactic that would never have worked on Stewart.
I will, however, not be going back to check.
Good reportage about a manifestly creepy community. And it's odd to consider how much of the same groupthink you saw in Marblehead was in play in the isolated desert communities in Southern CA where I came of age. We were aerospace- and defense-contract funded for the most part, and the church youth groups were used as both adolescent babysitters and cultural-indoctrination centers. There were even a few apocalyptic militia-heads, although their communication was via mimeo handouts and the membership topped out at eleven or twelve guys, some only available if the wife wasn't using the family station wagon. (The Internet simply made an already-existing problem worse, and adequate monitoring proposals aren't yet anywhere in sight that I'm aware of. One would think that 6 January 2021 would've accelerated such a needed process.)