Scam Artists for Far Right Revolution

What the Jan. 6 hearings reveal about cultures of grifting and militarism

I’ve been trying to watch the January 6 hearings like a novelist or filmmaker, instead of as the journalist and historian that I actually am. It’s riveting to watch that way—focusing in on characters and plots, visual and aural details. Yesterday, I became semi-obsessed with Jason Van Tatenhove, the former Oath Keeper spokesmodel. He looked like he’d been cast for the role—hair, tatoos and wardrobe just right. What he said was rudimentary. He provided only basic, vague information about the organization, but sounded a clear warning that the Jan. 6 incursion on the capitol was a bellwether for armed revolution and possible civil war should Trump run for president again. Those warnings got the attention of the media pundits and social media, in the wake of which I googled for some background.

It turns out that after leaving the Oath Keepers, Van Tatenhove has settled into a life as an artist, writer and organizer on half of working people, women and climate action in Colorado. On MSNBC after the hearing he came out to Joy Reid as “openly queer.” So it’s been a long strange road for Jason. His “before” testimony offered from the perspective of his “after” life underscored three significant aspects of life on the US far right:

1) The Fantasies

Van Tatenhove’s references to “armed revolution” and “civil war” did not describe actual possibilities emerging from the invasion of the capitol on Jan. 6. Sure, that invasion killed and injured people, it could have caused a serious national political crisis by derailing the final step in certifiying the presidential election. It could have been a lot worse than it was. But even at the far end of the spectrum of horrifying possibilities, terrorism and crisis in that context did not amount to a possible armed revolution. The fantasy of armed revolution was clearly shaping the events, however. The Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and others had trained for it. They came semi-prepared for it. But that fantasy required willful blindness about the nature of the US state and its policing and military power—power that was not going to come over to their side in this context, as the deaths and injuries of capitol police officers showed. If a civil war is in the offing in the years ahead, it will require wider and deeper organizing than this crew could imagine or pull off (even if we add in the logistical stylings of Rudy Guiliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump)—it’s certainly not impossible, but for this group it’s a mobilizing fantasy not a plan. Angry guys in tactical gear battering down the barriers to the capitol seem more like a video game than a revolution—which will require an ongoing seizure of institutions. These guys are the props not the players. They are indeed dangerous, but there is also a pathos in their cosplay.

Fantasies of masculinist violence are a central part of fascist movements, as Klaus Theweleit’s classic 2 volume study of the imaginative life of the German Freikorps, Male Fantasies, shows. The fantasies of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys today are not “just” fantasies, they are the foundational myths of militarism. But it is striking to note, via Van Tatenhove’s account in the press (though not at the hearing), how much these fantasies are working in the service of widespread scamming—they are key to the success of the grift that is a central motor of the far right.

2) The Grifts

Van Tatenhove became disillusioned with the Oath Keepers for a variety of reasons, particularly the Holocaust denialism he encountered among them (he has Jewish family members). But aside from the racism and visions of violence that he ultimately rejected, he found the organization to be basically a scam. As a Feb. 2022 Denver Post article explained:

The organization’s leaders did not have core beliefs, but instead catered to whatever beliefs would be easiest to fundraise off of, Van Tatenhove said. Often, those were based on conspiracy theories.

“He’s going to cater to wherever the money is coming in from,” Van Tatenhove said of Rhodes. “He knows his base, that’s where they’re at. That’s where he gets his ego fed and where he gets his steak dinners at Applebees every night.”

The mix of scamming and sincere belief varies across the far right, from total performative scammers like Donald Trump or Alex Jones, to true believers like Steve Bannon who mix grifting with organizing (e.g. the We Build the Wall scam). Van Tatenhove’s description of the Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, and his place on this continuum is both disgusting and very, very sad—Rhodes is scamming his heart out (and now going to jail) for dinner at Appleby’s, while the high end grifters from Trump on down score millions while freely claming power in the world. Rhodes and his ilk seem not to realize what disposable pawns they are within the larger grifts.

3) The Contingencies

Van Tatenhove’s story illustrates the role of utter contingency in the rise of the far right. He just found himself in the vicinity of Oath Keeper action at the 2014 Clive Bundy standoff, hoping to write about it, when he got drawn into the narrative and fantasies, but also the proffered steady income from the group. He was repeatedly shocked into a dim awareness of how mean and dangerous his comrades’ plans became (the scene of his surprise that they failed to endorse his support of gay marriage is hard to believe though, could he have been *that* naive?). He moved on to cut a kind of countercultural figure in Colorado, his denim jacket signifying quite differently now than then. The grooming and wardrobe continuities from his years as a punk to an Oath Keeper to an artist/writer/community organizer reveals the Oath Keeper aesthetic as more Village People-camp/comic rather than purely threatening. Like the Obama-Trump and Sanders-Trump voters, his story’s illustration of contingency shows us both the danger of rapid movement to the dangerous far right and the openings for shifting narratives and fantasies leftward.

Of course that contingency has its class/race/gender demographic limits. The militarist cosplay on the right is located—appealing more to small business./home owners and downwardly mobile precarious constituencies than to the rich, to workers or to the poor. It’s mainly (though not exclusively) a white thing. Gun-toting, politically active women are more than welcome! Though the underlying narratives and fantasies are resolutely masculinist, if not misogynist.

The reasons for these demographic parameters are not rooted in shallow “identity” politics, but in the long histories and legacies of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. Fantasies of violence and narratives of entitled dominance are rooted in those histories, and work their differential way through populations, whether they are aware of them or not. It’s bracing to observe the work these fantasies and narratives do, how easily mobilized they can be for fundraising as well as ideological purposes, but also how challengeable they also are.