Could Should Might Don't: How We Think About the Future

By Nick Foster

10 min read

Why does it matter? Because the movement that stormed the Capitol looked nothing like what you imagine from the outside.

Picture the militia member you're imagining right now. Committed. Ideological. A true believer with a manifesto and a cause. Now replace that image with a tattooed punk rock artist — former heroin addict, father of daughters, laptop where the rifle should be — thinking: what exactly have I gotten myself into. Jason Van Tatenhove spent years inside the Oath Keepers not because he bought the ideology, but because belonging is a drug, and living inside a story that feels like it matters is the delivery mechanism. This is the account of how ordinary people don't get recruited into extremism so much as they drift into it — and how someone smart enough to see the grift clearly can still take years to walk away.

The Seduction Isn't Ideology — It's the Feeling of Living Inside a Story That Matters

Van Tatenhove reached for the one thing in the basement that felt like his: an old Iraq War flak jacket with the word MEDIA spelled out in duct tape across the front and back. Everyone else in that Kalispell armory was grabbing assault rifle magazines, body armor, fixed-blade knives that belonged in a Rambo movie — gearing up for a possible firefight with federal agents at a ranch in Nevada. He was the only person in the room without a gun, without camouflage, without any apparent business being there at all. Somehow that made him feel more purposeful, not less.

Van Tatenhove wasn't a true believer when he walked down those stairs. He was a former heroin addict, a punk rock kid from Fort Collins who'd sold his tattoo shop on Christmas Day and driven twelve hours through a Montana blizzard looking for whatever came next. A rising Denver art career, abandoned to get clean for his family. A DIY zine-maker with a Mohawk and a deep appetite for the feeling that his skills were being used for something that mattered. The Oath Keepers didn't hand him a manifesto and ask him to sign it. They handed him a camera and said: you're our media guy.

That's the entry point ideology almost never is. What pulls people in isn't doctrine — it's the sensation of walking into a scene with weight to it, a cast of characters more vivid than ordinary life, and a role that feels written for you specifically. For Van Tatenhove, the militia world looked, at first pass, a lot like the underground magazine scene in Denver or the DIY punk ethos of figuring things out yourself. He didn't agree with everything he saw in that basement. He picked up the vest anyway.

The Men Running the Patriot Movement Are Less Dangerous for Their Convictions Than for Their Lack of Any

Stewart Rhodes frightened people for the wrong reason. Everyone assumed militia leaders were dangerous because they believed too hard — convictions so deep they'd burn everything down for the cause. Rhodes was the opposite. The less fixed his beliefs, the more useful everyone around him became.

Here is what Rhodes actually did at the Bundy Ranch, the very standoff he personally called his members to attend. He spent nights at a hotel eating buttered steaks while the men he'd summoned drove thousands of miles and slept in the Nevada wind and dirt. When a rumor circulated that the government had authorized a drone strike on the militia camp, Rhodes ordered a retreat to a casino. The men who stayed — the true believers he'd recruited — held a vote and banned him from the property under threat of being treated as a deserter. One veteran who'd driven from New England summarized it plainly: Rhodes had come to grandstand, get on camera, and collect donations. The cause was the vehicle. Rhodes was the driver, and he'd already checked into his room.

That gap — between the rhetoric and the hotel bill — is where the real danger is. A leader with unshakeable convictions is at least predictable. A leader who uses the movement's emotional energy as a fundraising apparatus will point that energy wherever it's profitable. The drone strike panic that fractured the ranch encampment scattered people who were genuinely prepared to die. The same dynamic, scaled up and aimed at a building rather than a Nevada desert, produces January 6th.

The Most Dangerous People at These Standoffs Were Never the Ones in Charge

Who actually poses the threat at an armed militia standoff? The easy answer is the man with the megaphone — the organizer, the ideologue, the one with the tactical vest and the camera crew. The true answer is the person nobody invited, nobody controls, and nobody wants to claim afterward.

Jerad and Amanda Miller showed up at Bundy Ranch during the April 2014 standoff, drawn by the same gravitational pull that brought cowboys on horseback and veterans sleeping in the Nevada dirt. They stayed a few days before Ammon Bundy's people asked them to leave. Too radical, even for an armed confrontation with federal agents. A few months later, Jerad Miller walked into a CiCi's Pizza during the lunch rush in Las Vegas, found two police officers eating, and shot both of them in the head. He and Amanda draped the bodies in a swastika and a Gadsden flag — the coiled rattlesnake symbol of the patriot movement — while Jerad yelled that the revolution had arrived. They killed one more person at a nearby Walmart before dying in a murder-suicide. Officers Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo were forty-one and thirty-one years old.

Van Tatenhove uses a specific term for people like the Millers: hang-arounds. Nomadic, untethered individuals who migrate from standoff to standoff not for any particular cause but for the feeling of belonging somewhere, for a meal, for a community that hands them a rifle and calls them a patriot. The leaders — the Stewarts, the Ammons — publicly disavow them the moment something goes wrong. But those same leaders created the conditions. You issue a national call to arms, raise the emotional temperature to the point where federal agents feel like an occupying army, and you cannot vet everyone who shows up carrying that energy into your camp. The Millers were too extreme for the Bundys. They were still close enough to absorb everything the standoff was selling.

At a later mine standoff in Montana, someone pointed to a padlocked wooden crate sitting in the open and mentioned, almost casually, that it held dynamite and blasting caps. The men with actual combat experience were alarmed. The young, untested arrivals wandering past it were not.

How You Become the Propaganda You Meant to Cover

An Oath Keepers press officer had published Van Tatenhove's name in newspapers across the state — the exact thing he'd asked her not to do. His state government employer saw it, concluded you couldn't work for the government while being publicly listed as a named operative in a militia standoff, and handed him an ultimatum. He resigned. Then Stewart Rhodes pulled into the parking lot of a Lincoln, Montana motel in a battered Suburban packed with children and dogs, climbed out looking unbothered, and within minutes had offered Van Tatenhove the title of National Media Director, a regular salary, and a cabin in Eureka. The organization had just destroyed his financial stability; it was now filling the vacancy it created. He went home, trained for a boxing match he'd already scheduled, and got knocked out by a twenty-four-year-old corrections officer. He took the job.

From inside that role, Van Tatenhove helped build the aesthetic infrastructure of the movement — the press releases, the video content, the media strategy that presented armed men on rooftops as community volunteers. After Oklahoma City, the word "militia" still smelled like Timothy McVeigh's fertilizer bomb, so the Oath Keepers repackaged paramilitary training as the Community Preparedness Team program: soft language about disaster relief and neighborhood safety, with photos inside showing men with assault rifles patrolling Ferguson. Van Tatenhove's media work helped normalize that image — made it legible, repeatable, spreadable.

In August 2020, a seventeen-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse crossed a state line carrying a rifle someone else had purchased for him, walked into the Kenosha unrest, and shot three men, two fatally. His stated reason for being there was to protect businesses and help with cleanup. Van Tatenhove recognized the language immediately. It was the same framing the Oath Keepers had deployed at standoff after standoff for years — the same messaging he'd helped package and distribute. He can't claim Rittenhouse read his press releases. He can't avoid the fact that the world Rittenhouse was navigating had been decorated, in part, with signage Van Tatenhove helped print.

The Movement Didn't Radicalize on Ideology — It Radicalized on Momentum

Radicalization through persuasion is a tidy story we tell to make extremism feel containable — someone hands you a pamphlet, you read it, you're converted. What actually happened to Van Tatenhove was closer to what happens when you spend enough time in any subculture: you start dressing like the people around you, and the clothes change what feels normal.

When Van Tatenhove — openly queer, privately uncomfortable with where the movement was drifting — wrote a draft piece on Kim Davis's refusal to issue same-sex marriage licenses, Rhodes killed it immediately. Don't discuss your orientation with the group, he said. Then, apparently to soften the blow, he offered what he seemed to think was reassurance: the Oath Keepers protecting a married gay couple defending their pot farm. Rhodes wasn't offering solidarity. He was offering a libertarian-flavored PR anecdote, a way to keep a useful employee in the tent without actually making room for him. This is the behavior of a manager protecting a donor base, not an ideological architect.

And the wardrobe followed the logic. Van Tatenhove traded his punk rock t-shirts for Under Armour and nine-line shirts, put on a black cowboy hat, and kept showing up until the aesthetic became the ideology. Nobody argued him into anything.

Rhodes understood that current. By the time the movement began coordinating security for Richard Spencer and adopting the street-fight aesthetics of the Proud Boys, Van Tatenhove describes Rhodes not as a true believer who'd followed his convictions to white nationalism but as an opportunist who'd tracked the momentum. The alt-right was growing, generating energy and money. Rhodes had already shown what he did with a useful person who made the donor base uncomfortable — he managed him. So when the movement's aesthetic shifted toward something uglier and the checks kept clearing, he followed it the same way, right up to the line where the fundraising stopped.

A Deli Counter in Montana Ends a Career in Propaganda

It came from a deli counter in a Eureka, Montana grocery store, on a late afternoon when he'd stopped in to pick up something for dinner. Some core Oath Keepers members were clustered near the seating area, and he walked over figuring they were catching up on local news. Then he registered what they were actually saying. He stopped, asked them to repeat it, and confirmed that yes — they were claiming the Holocaust had been exaggerated, the death tolls grossly inflated. Van Tatenhove has Jewish family. He stood there for a moment, said the only word that fit — 'Bullshit' — and left without buying anything, tires squealing on the mountain curves on the way home.

What followed was the least dramatic resignation in the history of a movement that prided itself on drama. He gathered his wife and daughters around the living room table and told them he had to quit his job, that he had no idea how they'd manage financially, but that they would find a way. Then he went upstairs and wrote the email. Rhodes called afterward and made some effort to keep him on — not much effort, apparently. There was nothing on offer that would have changed the math. The line had been drawn not by ideology, not by watching the movement drift toward the alt-right, but by a conversation that made it impossible to pretend he hadn't heard it.

The repair work was just as unglamorous as the exit. When a family whose son had been indicted over his role at the Malheur occupation threatened to stage their own armed standoff unless someone came out to help them, Van Tatenhove didn't call in a political favor or issue a statement. He called a former special forces soldier he knew as Big Ugly, drove three hours to Plains, Montana, and walked the family around their own property. Big Ugly explained, point by point, what the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team would actually do if it came to that: go through their defenses the way a hammer goes through a house made of popsicles. The son surrendered shortly after. No cameras, no press release. Just two guys in a truck and a conversation that kept someone alive.

Testifying Before Congress Is the Easy Part. The Hard Part Is Watching Yourself in the Museum.

The day before Van Tatenhove was scheduled to testify before the congressional committee investigating January 6th, he walked through the National Holocaust Museum in Washington. He made it through most of the exhibit before a single room stopped him cold: life-size photographs of SS officers and Hitler Youth, grinning, holding snarling attack dogs, radiating the particular ease of people who have decided certain other people don't quite count. He'd seen that expression before. Not in history books. In person, on militia members in multicam and plate carriers, making jokes about queer folk or Antifa — the same laughing disregard, the same comfortable certainty that the people on the receiving end of the joke didn't merit consideration. He had helped carry that messaging. He'd written the press releases, shot the video, packaged the aesthetic. Standing there among the shoes and the boxcars, he stopped trying to hold back tears.

Testifying before Congress is, in a strange way, the easy part — there's a chair, a microphone, an obvious thing to do with your hands. The museum is the hard part, because there's nothing to do there except look. Van Tatenhove watching those photographs is Van Tatenhove finally accounting, with precision, for what he'd actually been part of. Not a colorful adventure in gonzo journalism gone slightly wrong. Something with a lineage.

Fifteen minutes before he walked out to testify, a Capitol Police officer escorted him to a public restroom — three officers total, two posted outside, one inside checking corners. When the room was clear, the officer turned to him and quietly said thank you. Van Tatenhove choked up, shook his hand, and managed to say what he believed: that the officers were the ones who'd paid the actual price for what happened that day, and their gratitude meant more than anything he'd receive from the committee members.

He'd spent years doing unglamorous repair work in private — tipping off journalists he'd never be named with, watching January 6th unfold from his couch with the dawning recognition that he'd been wrong to dismiss the civil war rhetoric as theater, falling in love with a trans woman and discovering, slowly, that the broadcast rhetoric he'd once packaged so smoothly didn't survive contact with an actual person it was supposed to describe. None of that comes with a certificate. What it comes with is a Capitol Police officer thanking you in a bathroom, and knowing why you're the wrong person to be accepting it.

The Smirk You've Seen Before

The smirk is the thing that stays with you. Not the uniforms, not the dogs, not the architecture of the machinery — the smirk. That laughing ease of people who've quietly decided that certain others don't quite count. Van Tatenhove recognized it because he'd seen it recently, on men in multicam making jokes about people like him. The uniforms change. The smirk travels. And the real unsettling question the book leaves you holding isn't how he got in — that story is almost embarrassingly human, almost anyone's story — it's how many people are still in there right now, telling themselves the same thing he told himself, waiting for a deli counter conversation that goes one sentence too far. The repair he's doing reaches inward too: he describes sitting across from a trans woman he once would have written off with a slur, finding her funny and real and fully human, and having to consciously dismantle the broadcast rhetoric he'd spent years absorbing as instinct. That work is quieter than testimony. Then the family talked down, the committee appearance, the relationship that slowly stops reinforcing old cruelty. Not a bow. Just a debt, being paid in installments.