The son of the Oath Keepers' leader, Stewart Rhodes, has some things to say about leaving the alt-right cult. The whole thing is wild.

Stewart had been obsessed with the specter of a Clinton presidency, terrified of the FBI unleashed to go after the militia leaders who had slipped away from Bundy Ranch. I was mainly concerned that Federal agents raiding our house to arrest Stewart could end with our dogs being shot. It did, however, mark one important difference from the past: Stewart was losing his mind over this month's Potential Apocalypse and I felt almost totally indifferent to the end-of-world aspect.

I had political anxiety a-plenty, sure, but I had detached myself from the cyclical fear of every headline that had ruled my life until a peak at Jade Helm '15. While Stewart fretted and plotted in insane megalomania, laboring under the self-gratifying delusion that the Clinton dynasty and Bilderberg Group were hinging their plans with bated breath on Stewart's tactical decisions, the first thread in my belief had unraveled.

The bitter thought that Stewart's decisions were putting our dogs in danger of being shot during a standoff at our home would be the beginning of the next step. My belief in The Donald had already peaked, although I did not know it.

My entanglement in Pizzagate and Clinton conspiracy theories would allow me to ignore the pointed fact that no one had been arrested as promised, but I could only ignore the advance of time for so long. This, the forever wait by the Lock Her Up contingent of Trump voters, would become what I mark as the prototype of the eternal 'two more weeks' familiar to anyone who has studied QAnon. I was not down for eternally clinging to scraps of theory and inference, and so my enthusiasm for Trump dwindled to a gray indifference while others were sucked in deeper.

The second step would take longer, a slowly dawning awareness against a backdrop of childish Tweets from the white house and ineffectual media circus leadership. This was largely because I started to see uncomfortable parallels between the way Trump ran his cabinet and the toxic mismanagement style Stewart brought to the Oath Keepers board of directors. Any similarity between my father and Trump was cause for concern, and being raging narcissists the similarities were many, since I was by now completely aware that my father was a psychopathic fraud. I'd begun planning my family's escape, a process that would take nearly two years to complete, and took on myself a world's weight of new responsibility. Online political discourse and conspiracy theory simply took a backseat.

I would jerk back to attention, however, when our country betrayed the Kurds.

Or

A perennial problem in militia and conservative activist orgs is keeping members engaged and money flowing when a Republican is in office, the threat being that many members would assume that all was now well and 'go to sleep' instead of continuing to power Oath Keepers. Taking up position as he who watches the watcher would be one legitimate path to keeping Oath Keepers in circulation as an organization.

However, going full MAGA and setting itself against the shadowy leftist threat would prove to be the path of least resistance. Many militias would make this choice, aligning unquestioningly with MAGA to stay relevant and keep the numbers up despite going against their stated antiauthoritarianism and distrust of government.

If I fully understood this at the time, the events of the BLM riots would have been less of an awful surprise.

This part is going to be hard to imagine, even after getting oriented a bit on what the inside of my younger self's brain was like, but the fact that the entire Constitutionalist militia movement did not turn out in solidarity with Black Lives Matter in 2020 was a massive shock to my entire belief system.

...

In my view, Oath Keepers and many allied militias had more history of sympathy with BLM than of being antagonistic, or at least of general ideological alignment. Oath Keepers had taken great pains to boycott events that also hosted speakers from racist groups, maintained careful separation from alt-right and Identity Europa contingents at the Berkeley protests, and once kicked Randy Weaver out of an Oath Keepers parade after he refused to renounce White Separatism. I saw the militia movement I had lived in as a force loyal to the idea of America, not an ethnic majority.

...

Instead, they stayed at home, laughing at 'the left' for finally getting their turn under the boot (in a very particular view of reality) and actively cheering the black helicopters. The use of state violence against protest movements in modern America moved toward normalization, the president threatened the deployment of US military forces to crush protests, and the anti-government freedom fighters applauded from home.

...

Their excuses when pressed were varied, shallow, and made little sense. The protest was ridiculous because black abortions happened and people protest that less, where was the protest for people killed by illegal immigrants, there's 'intelligence' that Antifa is going to launch a terrorist attack at 7 PM (in which case you absolutely should be standing in the open, clearly identifiable as right wing militia and incredibly predictable in your regular movements while you patrol the venue, you go dude), the killing of George Floyd was a conspiracy because that many cops shouldn't have shown up that quickly for a counterfeit bill call and that meant a false flag engineered to sow social chaos. On and on, bewildering bullshit and empty whataboutisms without any real concrete reasons that had more than a single sentence of depth.

So much more.