Depending on your perspective, the Oath Keepers are either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia.
In the age of town halls, talk radio and tea parties (Pastorius comment: "Oh, the horror"), middle ground of opinion is hard to find.
Launched in March by Las Vegan Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers bills itself as a nonpartisan group of current and retired law enforcement and military personnel who vow to fulfill their oaths to the Constitution.
More specifically, the group's members, which number in the thousands, pledge to disobey orders they deem unlawful, including directives to disarm the American people and to blockade American cities. By refusing the latter order, the Oath Keepers hope to prevent cities from becoming "giant concentration camps," a scenario the 44-year-old Rhodes says he can envision happening in the coming years.
It's a Cold War-era nightmare vision with a major twist: The occupying forces in this imagined future are American, not Soviet.
"The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here," Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer, said in an interview with the Review-Journal. "My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can't do it without them.
"We say if the American people decide it's time for a revolution, we'll fight with you."
That type of rhetoric has caught the attention of groups that track extremist activity in the United States.
In a July report titled "Return of the Militias," the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center singled out Oath Keepers as "a particularly worrisome example of the Patriot revival."
The Patriot movement, so named because its adherents believe the federal government has stepped on the constitutional ideals of the American Revolution, gained traction in the 1990s and has been closely linked to anti-government militia and white supremacist movements.
The movement is blamed for spawning Timothy McVeigh, who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.
"I'm not accusing Stewart Rhodes or any member of his group of being Timothy McVeigh or a future Timothy McVeigh," law center spokesman Mark Potok said. "But these kinds of conspiracy theories are what drive a small number of people to criminal violence. ... What's troubling about Oath Keepers is the idea that men and women armed and ordered to protect the public in this country are clearly being drawn into a world of false conspiracy theory."
Monday, October 19, 2009
READY TO REVOLT: Oath Keepers pledges to prevent dictatorship in United States
Group asks police and military to lay down arms in response to orders deemed unlawful
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4 comments:
the Alinsky-ites are already setting patriot groups like the oath keepers and 'demonizing' them....
As I remember -- that is rule # 4 ---
rule # 5 is-make us play by our own -honorable rules....
As I recall-- McVeigh was photographed in the company of Islamists and was purported to be funded by them..
Anonymous 1 - whenever one hears the reference to McVeigh, one must also recall "The Third Terrorist ...Hussain Al-Hussaini " & forbid the whitewash of the jihad component of the OKC bombing.
NEVER FORGET. NEVER FORGIVE.
I remember, very clearly, the day of the Oklahoma bombing.
I was working in a business where country clubs were my clients. I walked into Lakeview Country Club in Burbank (home of many huge "stars") and the receptionist told me what had happened.
My reply was, "Was it Muslim terrorists?"
She said, "No, it's a white guy."
And, I believed it.
It fit the Clinton narrative, and I liked Bill Clinton.
Still do ...
even though he covered up TWA Flight 800 and other stuff.
Bush covered up shit too. Conservatives don't want to admit it.
Which is weird, since Bush wasn't a conservative.
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