Chino Valley, AZ — Jim Arroyo arrived for our meeting at Lucy’s Bar and Grill—home of the “best badass burger in town”—wearing an Oath Keepers hoodie, a baseball hat, and a bracelet. He’s a short, stocky man with a white beard, who walks with a stick. He had a pistol strapped to his waist and was accompanied by his wife, Janet.
The two run the Yavapai County Preparedness Team, a corporate spin-off of the Oath Keepers militia that they formed in the aftermath of January 6, 2021.
Arroyo tells me he’s been prepping the members of his organization for civil war following the election. (He claims membership exceeds 1,000; WIRED was unable to independently confirm this. The Rumble channel for his group has nearly 350 subscribers.)
“The election can certainly trigger a civil war, no different than it happened in any number of countries around the world,” Arroyo says over pastrami on rye, fries, a side of horsey sauce, and coffee. “I’m training people to survive a civil war, to get out of the way, to stay home, stay off the grid, have enough supplies.”
The couple is convinced that there is a grand conspiracy to prevent Trump from becoming president again. “They want to take him out so that he can’t get back in the White House,” says Jim Arroyo. WIRED spoke to the Arroyos on the eve of the election to get insight into how he views the potential for violence in the days to come, how he will react, and who he thinks will fire the first shots.
Paramilitary groups have long leveraged fantasies about impending natural disasters or domestic conflicts to galvanize their members. Arroyo and his wife say they train members for all sorts of events, such as economic collapse, attacks on the electrical grid, civil unrest and World War 3. But the focus on civil war by paramilitary and anti-government groups has been particularly intense this year leading up to the election. A recent intelligence memo reported by WIRED warned that civil war rhetoric online was radicalizing individuals toward violence.
In the aftermath of January 6, for which dozens of Oath Keepers, including founder Stewart Rhodes, were arrested, the paramilitary movement scrambled to distance itself from the stigma of the event—even the word “militia.” The Oath Keepers, once the most prominent militia organization in the US, essentially collapsed. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of chapters dropped from 70 in 2020 to just five in 2020.
Arroyo, like many others in the paramilitary movement seeking to distance themselves from the stigma of January 6, offered a sanitized view of the Yavapai County Preparedness Team. “We’re an educational organization,” he says.
Arroyo broke ties with the main Oath Keepers organization and formed “The Oath Keepers of Yavapai County,” an independent group under the umbrella of the Yavapai County Preparedness Team, a corporate nonprofit Arroyo founded over a decade ago. “It’s all the same basic program,” Arroyo said. It also includes the Lions of Liberty, the group’s political arm, which planned ballot drop box stakeouts during the 2022 midterms but agreed to stand down their operations before election day following a legal challenge.
Arroyo said that there’s been an effort to revive the national network, via a new outfit called Oath Keepers USA. He claims that they tried to recruit him, but he declined because membership required expensive background checks and $70-a-year membership fees. “We have lost contact with everybody,” says Arroyo. “Everybody kind of went underground after what happened, because of the fear of getting arrested for just being a member of the Oath Keepers, which was nonsense.”
He also claims to work closely with Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes and says many of the Yavapai County Preparedness Team members are part of the sheriff’s different “posses,” including his ham radio posse, his mounted posse, and the volunteers-in-protection posse, who are armed and can be relied on to back up the deputies if needed. (Rhodes did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) A 2022 report by the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting called Arizona “ground zero” for the constitutional sheriff movement, which has extensive ties to anti-government and paramilitary groups. That report found that more than half of Arizona’s 15 county sheriffs were “at least partially aligned” with constitutional sheriffs.
In our interview, Arroyo took a bipartisan view on who he believes could instigate a future conflict.
“Let’s just say, hypothetically, the left loses this race, which is looking like that could happen,” Arroyo said. “The radical left is violent and can mobilize a lot of people to do a lot of damage. The right, if they get pushed too far, have all the guns, all the training, all the experience.” (Data does not support a both-sides approach; a report earlier this year by the National Institute of Justice found that far-right attacks continue to significantly outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism, including from the left).
But Arroyo said it’s “very likely” that if Trump loses, “the right wing, the Republican Party, some nutcases, are going to get together and start a shooting war.”
Hours earlier on Zoom, Arroyo was speaking to members of other county preparedness teams from across the country and told WIRED that there was only one thing on everyone’s mind.
“The main concern right now is the potential of civil unrest because of the election,” Arroyo said. “Whoever wins, one side’s going to be pissed off, and the other side, the radical-left side, is going to be more pissed, and they’re more known for burning cities to the ground when they don’t get their way. The right-wing conservative party in this country is not known for doing any of that type of thing.” (When WIRED interjected and asked about the Capitol riot, for example, Arroyo brushed it off, claiming that it was orchestrated by the left).
Rather than engaging, his advice to his members is to hunker down.
Arroyo also floated the possibility of “black swan” events—which have become a popular fantasy among conspiracy theorists. A black swan event is one that has a great effect and could not have been predicted but which looks in hindsight to have been inevitable; conspiracists now treat the term as a cousin of the “false flag” and define it as an extreme occurrence orchestrated by nefarious forces to distract from a sinister plot. “They want to take [Trump] out so he can’t get back in the White House,” said Arroyo. “To create an environment in which they can declare martial law—create a scenario, some type of black swan event to halt the election.”
Jim and Janet Arroyo moved from California to Yavapai County in the early 2000s to escape what they saw as overly restrictive gun laws.
In Arizona, they found a state much more in tune to their gun needs.
“This is a big gun culture. Arizona has the largest amount of privately owned machine guns in the country,” Arroyo boasts. “Yavapai County has the largest amount of machine guns in the state of Arizona. That’s our claim to fame.”
(A 2021 report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives shows that Arizona didn’t even make the top 10 states for machine gun ownership, and California ownership was significantly higher.)
But just as Arroyo was boasting about Arizona’s welcoming approach to guns, the barman approached him and said he wasn’t allowed to have his gun in the bar. Arroyo told him he wasn’t drinking, but the barman insisted. “Not a problem,” Arroyo said, and brought the gun out to his jeep.
You can follow all of WIRED’s 2024 presidential election coverage here.
