The Dictatorship
The dangerous truth I learned after I finally escaped the leader of the Oath Keepers
In February 2018, my children and I escaped what I felt was a very dangerous marriage. I secretly packed the last of my children’s important documents into my oldest son’s truck while two of my kids were ducked down onto the floorboards. My heart was beating so hard, it was almost all I could hear. The next 30 seconds would change everything, one way or another.
As we pulled away, my then-husband ran out of the house, but then stopped. “Pick up a steak on your way back,” he called out. And that was it. Two years of planning led to that one moment.
As is often the case, things didn’t start out that way.
Even on our best days, when Stewart was at his most romantic, just the slightest curve could change everything.
The day I first spotted the now infamous founder of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, he wasn’t clad in camouflage or a black cowboy hat. With still two good eyes, he wasn’t outfitted with his iconic leather eye-patch. Nor was he stirring up a sea of followers with a speech that ended with a fist pump and a resounding shout of “Hoo-uh!” Instead, in the early spring of 1991, he was shuffling awkwardly with his dance teacher, mouthing, “Cha-cha, 1-2-3, cha-cha, 1…” to himself in a Las Vegas dance studio as he tried to keep up with her steps. I noticed him immediately because it was the first time in a week that a student under 65 years old had been inside the strip mall dance studio plunked between Mountain View Tax Preparers and The Kopper Keg, where I was then training to be a dance instructor. Later, when we were properly introduced, he bought me a soda in lieu of a beer (I was still a teenager) from the Elks Lodge bar counter and we danced a rumba together.
As our relationship progressed, we made a lot of plans for the future. There was little sign of the person he would become; I had no way of knowing the man I was with would be convicted of seditious conspiracy and spend time in prison for orchestrating crowds to storm the U.S. Capitol; that newly-elected President Donald Trump would then commute his 18-year sentence and release him and he’d return to Capitol Hill praising the new Trump era.
Back then, on our days off, we would scan the newspapers for open houses and visit several in a day in our best clothes with fancy coffees in hand. At 25, he was only a couple years out of the Army after a parachuting accident had abruptly ended his military career, and he was still rethinking his life path. He told me all about his visions for the future that included college and maybe even graduate school.
He often suggested it in a way that made me feel guilty — that he didn’t have the supportive family that I did, that life wasn’t as easy for him.
I felt completely swept up. In retrospect, there was plenty in our relationship to give me pause. Even on our best days, when Stewart was at his most romantic, just the slightest curve could change everything. Knocking a drink over on the table was enough to “ruin the whole day.” He could go from laughing to slamming things around with no warning at all. And I would be left trying to make some sort of sense of it all.
Eventually, we decided the only way we could really move forward with our plans was for me to support him as he attended school. I dropped out of college, quit the job that I loved as a dance instructor and stopped attending time consuming dance auditions and competitions. I began working as an exotic dancer to pay for our rent as well as many of his hobbies like martial arts and nights out with his friends. I thought if I could give him all the love and support that he claimed to have missed out on growing up, that I could somehow heal him. He explained to me that he only lost his temper in the way that he did because he wasn’t on the path he was meant to be on. It was all just a sort of “restlessness,” as he called it, that he only experienced when he wasn’t on track. I was impressed that he seemed to feel such a sense of destiny.
He suggested starting an organization, something he had talked about a lot over the years. I had a glimmer of hope that this could be it; this could finally be the missing piece that made him whole.
He graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and after a stint working in Washington, D.C. for congressman Ron Paul in 1998, he graduated Yale Law School in 2004 just before turning 40. By the time we left New Haven for his clerkship with the Arizona Supreme court, we had three small children. But I was still waiting for his yet undefined “restlessness” to subside. His constant search for purpose meant we moved a lot. I counted 20 moves in as many years, several of them cross-country.
Finally, he claimed to have found his purpose. He was going to be a small-town litigator. Montana was going to be our new home. It was short lived, however, and just a year and half later we were back in Las Vegas, where he briefly worked for a construction defect law firm.
It was around this time that he suggested starting an organization, something he had talked about a lot over the years. I had a glimmer of hope that this could be it; this could finally be the missing piece that made him whole. But instead of healing his restlessness, it seemed to only embolden the worst in him.
His big idea was everything he thought it would be and more. His group immediately went viral within the 2009 Libertarian blog-o-sphere. He had had this ability to draw people around him for as long as I knew him. Throughout the years, he was always instructing classes. The topic mattered little — anything from women’s self-defense to the U.S. Constitution — but it always resulted in a cult following of hanger on-ers. People would encircle him while he talked on and on. Six p.m. classes turned into 10 p.m. parking lot lectures after the staff flickered the lights to usher us outside. The parking lot tour would often shift over to Denny’s until 2 a.m., with the kids and I nodding off at the table or sleeping in the car while we waited. Even after he climbed into the car to drive home, he’d roll down the window, the last of his audience leaning on the car door while he carried on to the last.
Oath Keepers at its height had 40,000 dues-paying members (many of them police officers and politicians according to a leaked membership list) making it the largest militia in modern American history. Stewart held his followers’ attention with his uncanny ability to elicit their emotions in the same mesmerizing way many cult leaders do. He often focused on disillusioned veterans who were hungry for purpose and to regain a sense of mission they had lost. Oath Keepers gave them not just a brotherhood, but a task: “One more tour of duty, because your oath never expired!” as Stewart often told them. He ramped them up with his fervent speeches and then set them loose to further his own goals. Several of his schemes made national news, the 2014 Bundy Ranch stand-off being just one.
In January 2021, my children and I watched from afar as the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and several smaller groups joined forces to storm the Capitol (Stewart himself did not enter the Capitol that day). We saw the kind of chaos that can be unleashed when more than one carnival barker works together toward a symbiotic con.
After the 2024 election, with Trump granting clemency for Stewart and many others who participated in the insurrection on Jan. 6, it might appear to some that their star is rising again. But I’m not convinced.
If there is one useful lesson I learned from 30 years with someone like Stewart Rhodes, it’s that false promises and the smoke and mirrors magic tricks to woo crowds are not something that can last. Real change requires more than just an emotional surge. Without substance, the fervor always ends eventually. And even the most skilled of flim-flam men lose the faith of the crowd when the house lights click back on. Today, I’m only looking ahead. I work full time, have taken a few college courses and have been slowly piecing together a memoir. I don’t know what the future holds, but, like many, I’m here to face it the best I can. And I hope that when the dust finally settles, we can all move forward.
Tasha Adams was married to Stewart Rhodes for three decades before leaving him, with her six children. She is currently working on a memoir.
When the New York Knicks qualified for the NBA playoffs in 2021, after an eight-year drought, the New York Post reported on that team’s sole postseason victory with the headline“Wild crowd of Knicks fans take over streets after playoff win.”
A friend of mine visiting the city at the time picked up on the palpable Knicks fever, though he was a bit flummoxed at the level of giddiness for a team that won just one game before being bounced from the tournament by the Atlanta Hawks. “This is a basketball town,” I said, “If the Knicks ever actually make a real run at the title, this place will go absolutely insane.”
Now the New York Knickerbockers are NBA champions for the first time since 1973, having defeated the San Antonio Spurs in a five-game series that featured the greatest comeback in NBA finals history. And New York fans are indeed back in the streets, this time in even greater abundance, exploding with joy.
Now the New York Knickerbockers are NBA champions for the first time since 1973, having defeated the San Antonio Spurs in a five-game series that featured the greatest comeback in NBA finals history.
Will Leitch aptly explained why Game 4, when the Knicks rallied from a 29-point deficit at Madison Square Garden, was a microcosm for this squad’s improbable, inspiring, record-breaking playoff run: “For whatever reason, the Knicks spent most of this season toggling themselves on and off, like a circuit breaker. They just toggled themselves off and back on again. But this wasn’t a toggle: This was the smashing of a plunger that blew the roof off an entire building.”
There were doubts that first-year coach Mike Brown would be able to build off the success of his predecessor Tom Thibodeau, whose five-year run ended with the Knicks’ loss in the 2025 Eastern Conference finals, but made the Knicks legitimate title contenders for the first time since Bill Clinton was president. While this team has a lot of talent, it is hardly made of superstars.
Team captain Jalen Brunson made this year’s All-NBA Second Team, but none of the other Knicks made even the third team. Instead, their special sauce is chemistryas Brunson is joined by two of his NCAA Championship-winning Villanova teammates, Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges; New Jersey native Karl-Anthony Towns has won hearts with both his play and candor about personal tragedies he’s endured in recent years; OG Anunoby brings a quiet grittiness and clutch efforts on both sides of the court; and rotation players coming off the bench each knew their role and played with confidence when called on to play.
A Knicks fan went viral this month with the chant, “My mayor’s Muslim / My bagel’s Jewish / My Christian’s Dior / Knicks in four!” The Knicks didn’t win the title in four, but the sentiment captures the atypical warm and fuzzies engendered by the team’s championship run — and the magical, fleeting moments that won’t be forgotten by anyone lucky enough to experience them.
New York, famously not the friendliest of cities, has been tangibly united behind the Knicks. Thousands of people watching the games on a screen outside MSG on Seventh Avenue. Intrepid New Yorkers projecting the ABC broadcasts onto handball walls and the sides of buildings for their neighbors. Staten Island hip-hop legends Wu-Tang Clan rallying the moribund Garden crowd at halftime in Game 4, when the Knicks trailed by 27 points.
Anyone who has been in this city since April, whether they’re a lifelong fan, a late-coming bandwagoneer or a grimacing hater of all things New York sports, has experienced a communal, euphoric, even egalitarian vibe (though it didn’t extend to ticket prices at the Garden). As Alex Kirshner wrote in Slate“What’s happening here is some kind of confluence, one that a lot of people are desperate to bottle up but that might not come around again.”
John Turturro, the veteran actor and native New Yorker, said “one of the joys of being alive” is riding the subway with other fans after a Knicks win. “I’m in this city that no one ever looks at each other and everyone’s talking to each other,” he told CNN.
To be sure, there have been some terrible “fan” moments during the finals — when a creep threw an egg at Spurs star Victor Wembanyama on the sidewalk or when a mob viciously assaulted a Spurs fan outside the Garden after Game 3. And as The Athletic put it with regard to the clout-chasing viral video wannabes doing stupid, dangerous stunts for the clicks, “Attention-seeking knuckleheads are the lone blight on these amazing NBA Finals.” Here’s hoping said knuckleheads don’t spoil the Knicks’ victory parade down the Canyon of Heroes for the rest of us.
Yes, there are longer-suffering fanbases. Yes, New York City’s smug self-regard and disproportionate national media attention will always generate a certain level of resentment. But few fanbases have cared this much, for this long — selling out the Garden nearly every game night, even when the team’s play was abominable and the organization was better known for its toxic environment and comical mismanagement.
New York might be the financial capital of the U.S. and a prime destination for an oligarch’s pied a terre (or two), but most of the 8.5 million of us in this city will never sniff that kind of privilege. This city is prohibitively expensive, it is perpetually dirty and its infrastructure only occasionally functions properly. It is, frankly, often such an exasperating pain that rational adults have been known to regularly question their life choices for still being here.
But the Knicks are champions for the first time in more than a half-century. And these particular Knicks — humble, hard-working, overachievers with personality — reflect a New York we’d all like to believe in. They’ve briefly made us forget our troubles, and allowed us to (mostly) leave politics at the door for a few hours a night.
This victory, by this team of players, has unleashed an unbridled ecstasy from denizens of a place that prides itself on world-weary cynicism — even if that merely conceals a hopeless romanticism just beneath the surface. Go New York, go New York, go!
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW.
The emerging agreement with Iran that President Donald Trump is touting does not appear to achieve several of the key goals he stated at the outset of the military conflict over three months ago.
For one, it’s unclear whether the president’s core objective of permanently preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb will be achieved. Experts say that based on the limited information provided by the administration so far, Iran offered Trump’s envoys a better nuclear deal before the war than the one Tehran is apparently offering now.
The killing of the country’s top leaders by the U.S. and Israel appears to have strengthened and emboldened the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is more radical than his late father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Having demonstrated their ability to close the Strait of Hormuz and absorb U.S. and Israeli air attacks, Iran’s new hardline leaders, experts say, are likely determined to maintain its nuclear program in some form and wield greater influence in the Middle East.
“A war meant to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons will be the war that pushed them over the Rubicon,” Danny Citrinowicz, a retired Israeli military intelligence officer, told The New York Times.
There appear to be several key holes in the draft memorandum of understanding as it was outlined by a senior Trump administration official to reporters on Friday.
It is unclear whether both sides have agreed to the final wording of the memorandum.
Trump said on Saturday that he expected the “deal,” as he called it, to be signed on Sunday. But a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry reportedly said any signing of a memorandum of understanding “will not be tomorrow.”
No limits on missiles
The senior administration official did not describe to reporters that any specific limits on Iran’s missile stockpile had been agreed to as part of the memorandum. When Trump announced the war on Feb. 28, he said one of the administration’s core goals was to “destroy their missiles.” Recent U.S. intelligence assessments found that 70% of Iran’s missile stockpile remains intact.
Future funding of Iran’s proxies
There are also apparently no clear references to another goal Trump described at the outset of the war, to “ensure that the regime’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region.” The senior administration official only said the agreement would end fighting across the region and, as a result, Iran would apparently no longer fund its proxies.
“We feel confident that the Israelis, that the Gulf Coast partners, that the Americans and the Iranians are all going to get behind this thing,” the official said. “And we can make it enforceable, and we can make it stick.”
Few details about nuclear program
The senior administration official said Iran will be allowed to have a civilian nuclear power program, a key demand from the Iranians that hardliners in the U.S. and Israel have long opposed.
And the most important question about a civilian nuclear program — whether Iranian officials would be allowed to enrich uranium on its own inside Iran — was not clearly answered on the call. For years, Iran has insisted it must be allowed to enrich uranium to a low level inside Iran for civilian energy purposes.
The official said Iran’s enriched uranium will be down-blended, which was also part of the Obama-era agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. One element of the draft memorandum as described that is potentially better than the JCPOA is that all of Iran’s enriched uranium would be removed from the country after it is down-blended, according to the administration official. Under the JCPOA, 300 kilograms of enriched uranium was allowed to remain in Iran.
Palettes of cash
Iran will not receive any funding until it has implemented each element of the deal, the senior administration official said. If it does implement the agreement, the official said Iran will be relieved of “a lot of the economic pressures,” be “reintegrated into the world economy,” and get “rewarded for acting like a normal country.” If the deal is implemented as the senior official described, it appears that Iran will receive vastly more money than it did under Obama’s JCPOA.
Israel and Lebanon
The senior Trump official also said the deal includes an end to fighting in Lebanon, one of Iran’s goals but a step that Israeli officials may oppose. Israeli officials have said they reserve the right to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon if it threatens Israel.
The official said the agreement was a “broad regional peace agreement.” He added that “it includes Lebanon, it includes Iran, it includes the Gulf Coast countries, it includes Israel. And we feel quite confident that all of our allies, the Israelis and the Gulf Coast Coalition, will get on board.”
Clarissa-Jan Lim contributed to this reportexcerpts of which appeared in MS NOW’s live Iran war coverage on Friday.
David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has been restored to its original name.
President Donald Trump’s name was officially cleared from the marble facade of the storied cultural institution on Saturday, the Kennedy Center said, after last-minute attempts by the Trump administration to delay a federal judge’s ruling that the name cannot be changed.
The center’s executive director, Chris Matthew Flocka, said in court documents filed Saturday that the organization has “removed all physical signage on the Kennedy Center building and grounds, including the front portico, that purports to rename the Kennedy Center after President Trump or any other individual besides President Kennedy.”
Flocka also said that the center has withdrawn trademark applications officially referring to the organization as the “Trump Kennedy Center,” removed references to Trump from all paperwork.
Workers removed the lettering of Trump’s name after stormy weather in Washington late Friday caused delays. A large tarp was left hanging overnight covering the scaffolding and obscuring the view of which name — or names — remained. The tarp remained up on Saturday afternoon.
No trace of the current president’s name remained, according to court documents, in spite of his fight to the end.
Shortly after midnight, the Kennedy Center asked a judge to extend Friday’s legal deadline to remove Trump’s name until noon on Saturday because of the storms. The deadline extension was granted Saturday morning, buying the organization a few more hours to complete the erasure.
The removal of Trump’s name from the building marked a stinging defeat for the president a day before his 80th birthday. After being sworn in last year, Trump swiftly took over the institution, installing loyalists on the center’s board, upending its programming to align with his political preferences, slapping his name on the building, its website and merchandise. He also pushed for a renovation that would have shut the center down for two years.
The changes drew intense criticismincluding from members of the Kennedy family. A slew of artists canceled their performances at the center and attendance for the National Symphony Orchestra dropped.
Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, an ex-officio board member, sued to have Trump’s name removed from the center. On May 29, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that the Kennedy Center board of trustees must change its name back by Friday, June 12.
“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” Cooper wrote in his decision.
Trump fumed about the court ruling in a lengthy post on Truth Social in late May, criticizing Cooper — an Obama appointee — and suggesting that he would no longer be interested in it “unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else.”
Still, the Kennedy Center began making moves to drop Trump’s name from its website and in marketing material.
On Friday, the administration made several last-ditch efforts to halt Cooper’s ruling before the deadline, to no avail. However, the legal battle is not entirely over. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is considering the administration’s appeal of the May 29 ruling, is expected to rule on whether to issue a stay in the next few weeks.
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.
Fallon Gallagher is a legal affairs reporter for MS NOW.
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