Weekly Wednesday: 18 and life to go

"Your Honor, have you ever read Fight Club?'

Welcome back to Weekly Wednesday, sometimes weekly and often on a Wednesday. The big news of this week is largely personal: My mother is finally divorced, with Stewart now under a no contact order with my minor siblings and the divorce records unsealed ahead of his sentencing on the 25th. This means no one has to worry about a sudden Prison Blues onset of mandatory phone calls, that we can talk about some of the absurd shit that happened during the divorce case and custody hearings, and that my mom is no longer in the line of fire for lawsuits against Stewart over the Capitol Riot.

Most everyone reading this will already know most of those, but I will be breaking down each point in just a bit more detail as we round out the week.

First up, however, we have the long awaited Elite Goldmember subscriber poll. Deciding what terrible childhood anecdote to share is a bit too taxing for me, and so I’ve decided to offload this task onto the people who pay for this thing (I love you) that way they can feel like they’re doing charitable work and making a charitable contribution simultaneously:

No, I will not elaborate on what any of that means. I consider the needlessly cryptic titles part of the fun.

We will begin today with the divorce hearing, a Monday morning end to a nightmarish legal limbo that has been ongoing since 20018, but first a memorial day message: Specifically, I would like to thank Fuck and God for another memorial day passing in which I am no longer working for Oathkeepers.

As is tradition, I remark on my horrible Oathkeepers memorial day experiences about as many days after the fact as the Oathkeepers Memorial Day Sale post to go live. My Monday was spent breathing a long sigh of relief that I am no longer in a position where a huge portion of my day job is effectively lying to veterans, forever ‘temporarily’ keeping up the illusion of a working Org by manning 55 email accounts so that people who want to reconnect and be part of a good cause will keep sending in money. Celebrating the harm reduction of Oathkeepers dissolving so that it can no longer fleece veterans of their income and labor is a low bar for honoring the day, but it does beat a shameless used car Sales Event commercial set to a club beat rendition of Hail to the Chief for some goddamn reason.

With that out of the way, we will proceed to spill the tea: The grueling process of Stewart’s obstructionist, pointlessly cruel fight to keep my parents’ marriage on the books (contesting in writing that he does not consider the marriage irreconcilably damaged even unto his last filing before dropping off the edge of Militia earth) has been an ongoing background drag on my family since the beginning.

Even after being arrested the specter of Stewart’s joint custody with overnight visits hung over all of us: When it looked like he might be released on bail, there was a real possibility that my minor siblings could have been forced to make a plane trip to stay with Stewart under the supervision of his Patriot Movement true believer sisters, cousins, and assorted family (Including elderly, infamous Aryan Nations-affiliated scammer Roger Elvick) who were managing his legal GoFundMe. Even from inside a cell, Stewart could at any moment have become sad without warning and contacted my mother’s lawyer to arrange a visitation phone or zoom call.

How bad that could have been will not be clear until we get into courtroom antics down the page.

Further, Stewart had abandoned his status as a legal father for years at this point, but still held joint decision making authority over things like school, vaccination, and whether my mom could move out of the area under the interim parenting plan.

The process of Stewart being brought low has not been a sudden relief and sense of freedom at any point, it’s been a gun held to our heads at an ever increasing distance so that our chances of dodging the bullet steadily improve.

Even now the sense of looming violence is not gone, and I have to accept that I may never shake it.

Part of the marriage finally being dissolved is that the records have been unsealed, and we are at long last legally able to talk to each other about divorce court happenings and mouth off about them to the world. Raw Story reporter Mark Alesia has already done some reporting on the available legal documents, but the full amount is a stack of files numbering over a hundred that have not yet been fully revealed to the light of day. Of particular interest to me is the transcripts from the custody hearing, and the testimony therein, but that will have to wait.

For now, the best example is the conduct of Stewart when he was allowed Skype access to his own children: Stewart is unable to conceive of us not wanting anything to do with him by virtue of his personality, and latched onto the belief that we all hated him because mom must have vented to us about his many affairs and self-professed crippling porn addiction. We know this because Stewart vented to my minor siblings over Skype about how mom was divorcing him just because she hated him for his many affairs and crippling porn addiction. But don’t worry, Stewart had a solution:

He was going to do a 12 step program, and one of my minor siblings would be his accountability sponsor for online activity. Checking his internet history and monitoring his devices for adult content to keep dear old dad on the straight and narrow. Realizing only when prompted that asking a minor to do that would be bad, he concluded that my adult sister or I would have to do it instead. There was no possibility that we none of us would sign on to become his porn sponsor because he was simply not capable of imagining that we would refuse.

I can only guess that he blamed the outcome of that call, losing unsupervised visitation for some months, on mom’s allegedly vicious parental alienation He certainty complained about that a great deal through call and text and baby sister’s birthday, but he didn’t let that little resentment get in the way of recommending that we all microdose magic mushrooms and watch Doctor Strange like he had.

Moping, martyred, morose Prison Stewart waxing eloquent over a shitty Zoom connection was not something any of the children wanted to have to deal with.

Stewart, however, simply no-showed to the hearing in favor of begging for commissary money on a right-wing news show. The ‘American Solzhenitsyn’ will have to endure his deeply touching, romantic, and heroic political persecution for very real crimes, that he very much committed, all by himself for eighteen years through no fault but his own.

Not that he will ever be able to see it that way.

Catching up on the live tweeting of the sentencing hearing, it is first and foremost hilarious that Stewart in part condemned himself via the extremely hierarchical nature of Oathkeepers. Asserting rigid top-down control for narcissistic glory and channeling all command and control through yourself to play general works great until it’s time to take responsibility for your actions when you would really rather not.

The control Stewart exerted over Oathkeepers was not merely hierarchical, it was obsessive. Stewart kept his subordinates constantly on a rotation of overworked burnout and micromanagement, playing his favorites against potential rivals on the board and engineering political strife within the Org that he could complain about to upsell the difficulty of his job.

Above all else it was imperative that everything related to decision making flow through Stewart, bottlenecking all work through one of the laziest people I will likely ever know was the biggest problem Oathkeepers had before that same bottleneck started plotting immediate and actionable treason.

He would prefer to think that people just took advantage of his boundless but unspecified kindness and good nature, talking about himself the way side characters discuss a really poorly written anime protagonist to inform the audience that he’s just the best. It was a bold move to bring that to trial, but not one that surprised me.

Of course, Stewart spent quite a bit of time between bouts of comparing himself to fictional and historical characters he may have read about trying to deflect his own leadership and authority. The long history of Stewart assuming direct command during Oathkeepers ‘operations’ and exercising micromanaging control of the Org through its lifespan finally came back to bite him, if you don’t count the continuous gradual failure of Oathkeepers to function or reach its potential as prior biting.

It may have been somewhat more believable for Stewart to shrug off command-and-control of his own forces and shift blame if he had not started his testimony with attempting to take moral credit for fighting the good fight against destructive Leftism. His words in his own defense teetered between implying that he is a scapegoat for a broader disorder that he should not be blamed for alone, which approaches a good point, and morally justifying having to stop the election from being stolen under his oath to the constitution. Saying that Watkins went rogue leading her own ‘little militia’ outside of his control in the same statement as invoking the Election lawsuits that were thrown out by the Supreme Court as a justification simply does not work, and neither does pretending that he doesn’t understand what conspiracy means despite being a trained lawyer.

I will not lie, the abrupt jump from the careful arguments laid out by two out of three of his lawyers, while hinging more on re-arguing the case than advocating for Stewart’s future reform, to Stewart just coming out of the corner swinging with “I AM A POLITICAL PRISONER” got a laugh out of me. Much less funny is the second drive-by attempt to blame Kellye SoRelle, a woman I firmly believe to be another victim of Stewart’s abuse and manipulation, for his decision to delete evidence. Kellye may deserve her own prison time for the part she played in attempting to overturn democracy, but she doesn’t need more static for Stewart as a big adult trained lawyer deciding to stack committing crimes atop committing crimes.

Now Stewart is facing prison until he turns 76, and I doubt he’ll live to see it. I base this partially on my own reasoning of the situation and partially from predictions my mother got from a Ouija board reading in 2017. It has so far accurately predicted the year of his arrest, so we shall see when it comes to the rest.

Of course, much of Stewart’s grandstanding on the democrats being the ‘party of the KK’ and everything else is an extended interview for a pardo by a future right-wing strongman president. He has bet everything on this possible outcome, and the only question remaining is whether it will work. I have laid out my thought in a livestream last week, but the short version is that I don’t think it will.

The final thing to note, beyond my petty satisfaction at seeing that not one family member or friend showed up to speak on his behalf at sentencing, is that Judge Mehta perfectly rendered down every single thing I would have said if called to testify: That Stewart presents an ongoing threat to this country, that he assumes the law onto himself considers everyone else bit players in his struggle, and that the moment he is free he will begin to overtly or covertly wage war on the United States again.

“We’re all objects of your willingness to engage in violence.”

I can say that there is no sentence that better illustrates Stewart Rhodes than that.