Jim Arroyo arrived for our meeting at Lucy’s Bar and Grill in Chino Valley, Arizona, 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 potential civil war following the election. He claims that his group has over 1,000 members, but this could not be independently confirmed. 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 lunch. “I’m training people to survive a civil war, to get out of the way, to stay home, stay off the grid, and 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. On the eve of the election, WIRED spoke to the Arroyos to get insight into how they view the potential for violence in the days to come, how they will react, and who they think will fire the first shots.
Paramilitary groups often use 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 even World War 3. However, 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 towards violence.
In the aftermath of January 6, 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 non-profit. Arroyo and his wife continue to train members for potential civil war, but they maintain that their organization is focused on education and preparedness rather than violence.
