When the Oath Keepers were launched in 2009, the group’s central idea was simple and direct: It urged cops and soldiers to remember their oath to uphold the Constitution, and to lay down their arms if ordered to violate Americans’ rights. To that end, the group circulated a list of commands its members would not obey. Some of these hypothetical orders (“to detain American citizens as ‘unlawful enemy combatants'”) were more plausible than others (“to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people”). But in each case, the upshot wasn’t violent revolt; it was nonviolent refusal.

If you squint, you might spot a trace or two of those ideas in Rhodes’ post-election scheming. (In one chat message cited in the charging documents, he pointed to the largely unarmed Bulldozer Revolution against Slobodan Milošević as a model.) But his thinking had clearly taken a turn toward violence. Rhodes reportedly said after the election that if Joe Biden took office, a “massively bloody revolution” would be in order. In another message quoted in the indictment, sent two and a half weeks before the riot, an alleged conspirator who said he had just spoken with Rhodes reported that “the time for peaceful protest is over in his eyes.”

This isn’t the first time a group’s purpose has evolved radically. Just ask any historian of the 1960s to compare what Students for a Democratic Society was like in 1962 to what it was in ’69. But while the Oath Keepers have certainly undergone their share of splits and detours since their founding, they did so while one man stayed at the group’s helm. The story of the Oath Keepers’ evolution is ultimately the story of Stewart Rhodes’ evolution. And the last decade saw two big changes in how he viewed his organization and the world.