The Last Time This Happened

Someone is suspiciously unable to learn from the failures of the past

There’s something that comes up fairly often when I’m making my case for why Stewart would never have gone into the US capitol at the head of an armed paramilitary without some assurance that he would get away with it, and that’s my memory of what Stewart had to say about the last guy who did that.

Considering that he’s now out of prison and trying to clout chase in the replies of Capitol Terrorist Exposers and others, I feel it’s fair to shine some light on the dumb, dumb career of Adam Kokesh and the perspective on January 6th that it gave me.

Kokesh started out fairly innocuous, coming off of a public relations career in the Marines to become an often-interviewed activist for Iraq Veterans Against the War. He got booted from the Reserves for wearing his military issue camo pants to a protest, which gave him a sheen of authenticity for having made a tangible sacrifice for his cause (of course, this was also a great career move to a point). Finding that getting in official trouble was great for his platform, Adam would go on to be arrested numerous times at varying demonstrations, usually by the feds and often for worthy causes, crowned by a silent dancing protest at the Jefferson memorial alongside left-wing anti-war activists from Code Pink (back when there was some belief in common ground) and getting needlessly body slammed into the marble by park police.

In the midst of his timeline of arrests, Adam would host a show that was for a time affiliated with Russia Today in an early sign of its creeping influence in the American right. At the time Russia Today was considered sketchy by many, but sketchy in the same way that many on the right considered Al Jazeera to be: Clearly biased and hostile to the interests of the American Empire, but nonetheless often telling truth that US mainstream news would not. The fact of RT being an open and blatant propaganda network was part of the appeal for Adam, citing it as a “Rival Global protection racket” to the United States that would often use truth to attack the US and was at least open about its bias.

How little we understood. Except for the people who already had RT’s number and were ignored by the public to our detriment when they tried to warn us, they understood plenty.

So how do we escalate from protest campaigns against small-town anti-swearing laws and taking paychecks from foreign state media to an armed march on DC? I honestly cannot be certain, but I have theories.

At long last, we get into Militia World proper.

Necessary to my view of things is understanding the outsized influence that 3% Movement Co-Founder Mike Vendeboegh had on the militia cultural sphere as a whole. Building on credentials as a ‘reformed communist,’ a real feather in your cap in the militia right, he started the 100 Heads Life Insurance meme, broke open the Fast and Furious scandal, and was in my opinion instrumental in the 2008 new wave militia explosion. His outwardly vehement anti-racist crusading (while maintaining friends-of-friends with Neo-Nazis like Larry Pratt, much as Stewart did) helped to give the movement respectability and distinction from white hood slander, and perhaps more importantly gave the militia movement an internal mythos that framed all accusations of white supremacy as a falsehood against aggrieved patriots who simply stand for the Red, White, and Blue.

The other prong to Vendeboegh’s success, after exposing scandals and the narrative of an antiracist movement, was the platform of armed civil disobedience. His goal was to flip the perception of shifty radical minutemen playing bang stick tag in the woods by getting the militia to turn out in open daylight without provoking (or giving an excuse for) violence by law enforcement. The standard was to march with rifles slung, unloaded, and with a brightly colored plastic ‘range flag’ inserted into the breach to show anyone watching that the mechanism that puts the bullet in the ‘go boom’ position was physically plugged and rendered inoperable. Thus cleared of any accusations of handling loaded weapons in the direction of police, politicians, and journalists, the marchers then make their armed but technically-not-dangerous circuit heedless of free speech zones and simply politely refuse to be arrested.

The fact that the marchers were often decked out in body armor, tactical gear, likely carrying concealed pistols or perhaps many hidden knives would of course figure into the calculation for anyone thinking about responding the way they would to a left-wing student protest. Bonus weapons aside, consider the fact that you might be able to mace and TASE the 5 guys in front of you without them being able to clear their rifles, but not the 100 friends behind them. This is by design, and a tactic that I really cannot condemn without condemning groups like the Black Panther Party (inventors of the school lunch program) and Deacons for Defense and Justice who accomplished undeniable good for society.

As I recall, I only ever attended one of these as a teen. I recall looking up from the street with a borrowed earpiece connected to a radio on my plate carrier and seeing a shaven-headed state cop of some description peeking over the gables of a courthouse roof and cheerily waving hello before he vanished in a flash of sunlight off of Pit Viper sunglasses. I don’t remember why we were out in our full civil war kit, so the cause must not have been that worthy.

Following this basic template, Vandeboegh organized armed protests across the country to push the window of public perception and normalize the militia movement as a legitimate and accepted political force. It was one of these marches, organized on behalf of the legendary asshole father-son arsonist duo of the Hammond Family, that Ammon Bundy would recruit a splinter mob from to storm the Malheur wildlife refuge and ruin Vandeboegh’s lifetime of work in militia PR in one fell swoop.

Before that, we had Kokesh. I really think that Kokesh saw the direction the movement was going, away from the golden days of Ron Paul sign parties and throwing tea bags at a Federal Reserve building before going to a joint Occupy Leftist and AnCap protest against drone strikes, and towards a hard partisan militant style and decided to pivot his career with it. He was already well used to getting arrested for the sake of his protests, so an open carry armed march meant to end in mass arrest was just the ticket to make himself a militia martyr as a long-term play.

The problem with that is that it’s fucking stupid.

When Kokesh began promoting his march and collecting RSVPs, there was no vetting process whatsoever and the rhetoric around the march was tinged with violence from the start. Stewart and Vandeboegh were furious (though taking a more moderate tone in their public posts while talking their followers down from attending); Even if no one started shooting it was still a move that would put thousands of patriot movement aligned gun owners into the territory of federal charges, and if someone did open fire, this hypothetical of course couched in terms of an infiltrator within the march or a mercenary sniper faking the shooting of DC police, then they would be easily boxed in on the bridge to Virginia or caught in the open on a plaza and massacred. Either way, they would be both the aggressors and the losers, handing the New World Order an easy first victory and most likely starting the civil war with public opinion set against the militias. It was much the same set of mistakes that Ammon Bundy would later commit, and one that I think is fairly inevitable.

There may be something to the way that the Militia movement keeps kneecapping its own momentum in American politics by committing terrorist attacks.

Adam would persist with his calls for an armed march as his condemnation within the movement and the signups for the march continued to grow, going as far as posting a video of himself loading a shotgun on the grounds of Freedom Plaza (belying the peaceful and unloaded premise of the march in favor of appearing hardcore) that may or may not have been green screened and subsequently getting tripped up with a lot of suspicious substance charges. The march transformed into a fizzled call for protests at all 50 state capitols demanding the end of the United States Government, people tried coming up with insulting nicknames like “Cokefish” that never quite stuck, and amid legal woes Kokesh’s star fell to level of failed Libertarian Party presidential candidate. Today he makes sporadic attempts to clout-chase in the replies of Twitter users who actually do things like Queen Diane V and CTExposers, making little noises about his new “Oathbreakers” organization (“See it’s like the OPPOSITE of Oathkeepers, isn’t that so clever?”) and generally twisting in irrelevance. As it turns out, a failed armed march on the Capitol is not great for your career in militia politics.

That’s not the important part. What stuck in my memory is the laundry list of reasons why the march on DC was stupid to begin with that Stewart had at the ready while he and Vandebeogh were frantically calling up everyone in their networks to dissuade them from showing up. What is clear to me is that Stewart was perfectly aware from this prior experience of every single reason why stashing an armed QRF across the river on J6 and sending teams into the embattled Capitol was such a bad fucking idea, and yet did so anyway. After his apparent texting buddy Roger Stone having a prior history of strategically inciting mob violence to swing a contested election, it is my personal smoking gun on the involvement of oathkeepers in January 6th. Stewart is simply not as stupid as Adam Kokesh, though like many narcissists he may be more gullible, and would never have committed his dwindling forces without some other factor in play.

As the indictments keep racking up for Trump and his co-conspirators, we may eventually know for certain. Roger Stone and the Secret Service may be smart enough to cover their tracks*, but Trump’s own inner circle and other paramilitaries like Veterans for Trump are stacked with morons who may still have incriminating Signal chats with or about some familiar faces sitting forgotten on their phones.

Wishful thinking perhaps, but there was a time when Stewart being arrested at all was wishful thinking.

*As should be obvious, this post was written before the headlines broke on 08/23/2023 and time has not been kind to my assessment. Blame a childhood of conspiracy theory dogma for my continued overestimation of competence by shadowy figures and sinister plots.