Oath Keepers pledges to prevent dictatorship in United States. Group asks police and military to lay down arms in response to orders deemed unlawful.
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, 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 everhappening here,” Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper and Yale-trainedlawyer, said in an interview with the Review-Journal. “My focus is onthe 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.”
A reader asks us:
I have to state the obvious here because the article did not say or ask: WHY is it that organizations such as Oath Keepers that address the Constitution, maintaining it in addition to willing to die and defend it, are 99% European American majority? And yet no article in their right mind would EVER dare point this out! I think it needs to be pointed out every time. — GM
Editor’s response:
More often than not groups such as Oath Keepers indeed ARE portrayed as white activists, i.e. closet “white supremacists.” Give the hate mongers time to get around to Oath Keepers.