Commies Attack the Oath Keepers
You know you are doing something right when the Left puts you on their radar screens:
H/T – TGUSA
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
By ALAN MAIMON
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
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 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 Commies at SPLC certainly should be worried! They are the enemy!]
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.
[Timothy McVeigh was a Libertarian, idiot.]
“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.”
[Hah! Of course! Mark Potok!!! In case you are unaware, Mark Potok is a RADICAL LEFT WINGER and the source for just about ALL these "radical right wing" reports in the news---and has been for years! He is another Commie!]
Oath Keepers got some unwanted attention in April when an Oklahoma man loosely connected to the group was arrested for threatening violence at an anti-tax protest in Oklahoma City. Rhodes called the man “a nut” who had no real affiliation with his group.
[Every village has its idiot...]
Nonetheless, Potok’s group now monitors Oath Keepers on its Web site blog “Hatewatch.”
Oath Keepers is not preaching violence or government overthrow, Rhodes said. On the contrary, it is asking police and the military to lay down their arms in response to unlawful orders.
The group’s Web site, www.oathkeepers.org, features videos and testimonials in which supporters compare President Barack Obama’s America to Adolf Hitler’s Germany. They also liken Obama to England’s King George III during the American Revolution.
One member, in a videotaped speech at an event in Washington, D.C., calls Obama “the domestic enemy the Constitution is talking about.”
According to the law center, militia groups are re-emerging in this country partly as a result of racial animosity toward Obama.
[LOL! When in doubt, throw out the race card!!! ROFLMAO! How does the SPLC explain black people who don't like Obama's Communist ideologies? They can't, that's why they try to portray this all as a "white-supremacist" movement and completely ignore mentioning that there is a sizable chunk of black conservatives involved with these "radical right wing" groups who are pretty pissed off that the Commies are seizing control of America.]
It’s the “cross-pollinating” of extremist groups — some racist, some not — that is of concern, Potok said. As evidence that the danger is real, he points to several recent murders committed by men with anti-government or racist views.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reached a similar conclusion in a report earlier this year about the rise of right-wing extremism. The report said the nation’s economic downturn and Obama’s race are “unique drivers for right-wing radicalization and recruitment.”
[LOL! You mean the report that was politically motivated by the Commies in the government (specifically, Janet Nappy-Latrino) and written by a neophyte who based the entire "intelligence" report on articles gleaned from the Web---many of which were spawned by, surprise, surprise, MARK POTOCK! It's circular logic that the Commies are using to create a sense of fear to make the Right Wing the enemy, when the real enemy is the one pointing fingers!]
The homeland security report added that “disgruntled military veterans” might be vulnerable to recruitment by right-wing extremist groups.
That warning was enough to make Rhodes feel paranoid.
“They’re accusing anybody who opposes Obama of being a racist or a potential terrorist,” he said. “What they’re saying is, ‘We’re coming after you.’”
The motto of Oath Keepers: “Not on our watch!”
The message Rhodes hears from the government: We’re watching you.
Las Vegas police Lt. Kevin McMahill said his department’s homeland security bureau isn’t overly concerned with Oath Keepers at this point, even though Rhodes says several active-duty Las Vegas officers are members of the group.
“I wouldn’t classify Oath Keepers as no threat at all, but I wouldn’t classify them as a threat either,” McMahill said. “There’s always a chance an individual can step outside the boundaries of what an organization stands for and do something wrong.”
Rhodes, a former firearms instructor, said he easily could have started Oath Keepers during the Bush administration, but his focus during those years was first on getting his law degree and then volunteering on the 2008 presidential campaign of Texas Congressman Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican in whose office Rhodes worked during the 1990s.
What Rhodes terms “the rise of executive privilege” during the post-9/11 years of the Bush presidency will in his opinion only accelerate with Obama in office. What’s worse, he said, is that “gun-hating extremists” now control the White House.
Two things have happened since the Homeland Security Department and Southern Poverty Law Center released their reports on extremism: Membership of Oath Keepers has spiked dramatically. And Rhodes has had to do a lot of explaining.
“We’re not a militia,” he said. “And we’re not part and parcel of the white supremacist movement. I loathe white supremacists.”
Oath Keepers doesn’t offer paramilitary training; nor does it have a military command structure. It instead has board members, which include directors in seven states and outreach coordinators to currently serving local and federal law enforcement and military personnel. The group’s state director in Montana, who goes by the name Elias Alias, has said Montana and other states should consider seceding from the United States in protest of the federal government’s conduct.
Leaders of the group will come together in Las Vegas starting Oct. 24 for the inaugural national conference of Oath Keepers.
Among the group’s other leaders is Dave Freeman, an Army veteran and former Las Vegas police sergeant who spent more than 30 years with the Metropolitan Police Department.
For Freeman, Oath Keepers has become something of a family affair. He recruited his niece, a former police chief, to serve as state director for Oath Keepers in Massachusetts.
“When you believe in something, you have to do more than just pay it lip service,” said Freeman, the group’s Southern Nevada director and national peace officer liaison. “This is a crusade I believe in.”
[Amen!]
Another prominent Oath Keeper is former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack, who has long been an outspoken government critic.
The Southern Poverty Law Center calls Mack a “longtime militia hero” who helped weaken gun control laws.
[Yeah, Hitler didn't like folks who "helped weaken gun control laws," either... I forgot; who's suppose to be the supremacist here?]
An incident earlier this year in rural Iowa, not inside the Washington Beltway, motivated Rhodes to start Oath Keepers.
He questioned why the Iowa National Guard planned to use residents of a small town to participate in training on door-to-door searches for weapons.
The Guard said the training was to help soldiers who might be asked to carry out similar searches in Iraq or Afghanistan.
But for Rhodes, it looked like preparation for a future declaration of martial law. It reminded him of the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 when police officers reportedly confiscated legally owned firearms. What the government called emergency response after the levees broke, Rhodes saw as the imposition of martial law.
If it hadn’t been for April 19 of this year, Oath Keepers might not have gained the notoriety it now has.
On the anniversary of the Battle of Lexington Green, the Massachusetts battle that started the American Revolution in 1775, a group of Oath Keepers went to the battle site and reaffirmed their pledge to the Constitution.
The gathering was mentioned in the Southern Poverty Law Center report because April 19 is also the anniversary of the deadly end to the federal siege on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993; and of the retaliatory bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.
Rhodes and Potok have never talked, but if they did, they might find themselves speaking a different language.
“Let them say what they want to say, but April 19 has very much become a day for the extreme radical right,” Potok said.
Rhodes couldn’t disagree more.
“There are thousands of Americans who go to Lexington to watch re-enactments of people shooting at troops,” Rhodes said. “But if you’re a group of military and police there, they somehow find this offensive.”
Rhodes said he hopes Oath Keepers members think about the lawfulness of day-to-day orders they receive.
For example, if a police officer feels he is being asked to do an illegal search of a home or vehicle, he should stand down.
Rhodes eventually wants to create a legal defense fund for Oath Keepers who are disciplined by their employers for defying orders they deem unlawful or immoral.
“The message to law enforcement is not to become a tool of oppression,” he said.
Rhodes, a husband and father of five home-schooled children, said he gets hundreds of e-mails a day, mostly from people interested in knowing more about his group.
He also gets a lot of questions from “birthers” wanting to know if he thinks Obama is really an American citizen and from “truthers” asking whether he believes the attacks of 9/11 were an inside job. The group doesn’t have an official position on either issue, he said.
Some of his responses to questions have turned would-be allies against him.
“I’ve been accused of being a traitor or a CIA operative because I’m not coming out and declaring that the H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine is a biological weapon,” he said.
19 October, 2009 at 1:32 pm
So the message here is American Revolutionists were a bunch of white supremacists. It is true that the majority of them were white but there a little known fact that the left wants us to forget. There were patriots that were other than white too. Not all blacks were slaves and not all blacks today are decedents of slaves many are decedents of freemen and or Revolutionists themselves. The real white supremacists are the leftist elites just look at their flagship operation the inner city ghettos. 3% took to arms 10% supported them I would wager there are a lot more today.
They always bring up McVeigh the fastest man executed in America in 50 years. And that leads me to believe that there is much more to McVeigh’s story and I highly doubt that it involves the Constitution.
The founding fathers gave us all the tools that we need all we have to do is pick them up and use them.
Can anyone tell me the one individual that caused the greatest damage to the South before during and after the Civil war?
19 October, 2009 at 3:54 pm
McVeigh…a FOIA request forced the FBI to release the video of the OKC bombing. Interesting that the few minutes preceding the blast and the few minutes after, which would show who was in the truck and how it all went down in OKC, were GONE from all angles. Wonder what those shots show?
Before, during and after the Civil War? Long list to choose from. Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, the slaves themselves, abolitionists…
Taxes- and favorable breaks given to northern manufacturers that had friends in high places- were the primary reason for the South seceding. It was a matter of states’ rights, not slavery rights. If only they had succeeded…well, states’ rights are an issue we will revisit.
19 October, 2009 at 4:27 pm
I agree that it was not all about slavery and that states rights were an important part of it. Some will say that Lincoln pushed the South to it, others will say that things like forcing states to return escaped slaves pushed the northern states to it. We could blame the South Carolina hothead that fired the first shot on Ft Sumpter, there are many places to put blame.
I don’t at all like Shermans march to the sea but I would have probably done the same thing regardless of which side I was on, I wish we had a few Shermans today. BTW another American favorite, Patton, conducted war in much the same way as Sherman, musta read his book.
No the man who did the most damage to both North and South was John Wilkes Booth. If you read Linclons Geddysburg Adress you understand what his vision was and it was not one of anger or revenge or hate.
The Gettysburg Address
The Gettysburg National Cemetery was dedicated by President Abraham Lincoln a brief four months after the Battle. Lincoln’s speech lasted only two minutes, but it went into history as the immortal Gettysburg Address.
“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war. . .testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated. . . can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . . we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . . and that government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . . shall not perish from the earth. ”
If Lincoln had lived we would have a very different country today. Instead all the South got was retribution which led over time directly to where are today.
of course thats just my opinion and you know what opinions are like.
19 October, 2009 at 4:39 pm
“the one individual that caused the greatest damage to the South before during and after the Civil war?”
John Wilkes Booth, you say? I don’t know. We don’t live in a parallel universe in which Lincoln survived the shooting.
But, if you were talking about reality and the actions of a branch of government, I’d have to lay that one squarely at the feet of the Supreme Court, beginning with the Dredd Scott decision and continuing forward with their unwavering support of the Jim Crow laws after the Civil War…
Cheers
19 October, 2009 at 5:07 pm
But I also happen to agree with you that the Supreme Court by their past actions must be closely watched. Personally I don’t even like the name Supreme used in anything American except maybe ice cream or something.
Its funny, well not funny, it seems we woke up one morning and discovered that we have all kinds of un American institutions all around us.
19 October, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Parrallel universe, no we don’t and yes you are making my point. He was the catalyst that propelled us toward many of the actions that followed. Again IMO.
19 October, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Lately, I’ve been questioning the basis of everything I know or have been taught. History is written by the victors. And our history has been revised mightily.
Lincoln trashed the Constitution. The states retained their sovereignty when they ratified the Constitution, as they technically retain it today. The south voted legally to secede. Lincoln supposedly preserved the Union; he actually invaded and annexed a foreign nation.
The federal gov’t had NO LEGAL right to dictate an end to slavery, as horrible and wrong as we view it today, and Lincoln was a racist too.
In 1860, he said, “I think I would go for enslaving the black man, in preference to being enslaved myself. … They say that between the nigger and the crocodile they go for the nigger. The proportion, therefore, is, that as the crocodile to the nigger so is the nigger to the white man.”
The fed also had no right to levy onerous taxation (40+%) on the southern states while giving favored northern industry (which also used slave labor) a break. It was called the Tax of Abomination in the South. I’ll look around and see if I can find some links that detail the years leading up to the South seceding. I read about it months ago.
Do we really know what happened at Fort Sumter? Who really fired the shot and why? Can we know for sure there weren’t other factors involved?
Lincoln was NOT who we’ve been taught he was. He was a politician, not a saint. http://patriotpost.us/alexander/2009/02/13/lincolns-legacy-at-200/
He never intended for blacks to be equal to whites, EVER. In a debate with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln said:
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races — that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
Lincoln declared, “What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races…”
Bet you never read THAT in a history book.
AND, the Emancipation Proclamation did NOT free a single slave. It applied only to the CSA, where Lincoln had no legal authority. It excluded Union states and areas the Union army occupied. Lincoln’s Sec of State said, “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”
19 October, 2009 at 6:21 pm
I agree Az. But the killing of Lincoln only added to what was already a catastrophe across the board for the entire Republic. It allowed the festering wound to grow bigger I don’t think it is coincidence that Americans have seen an erosion of their rights since that time. The underlying debate for many Americans was property and what constituted property or more precisely, were men property, a monumental moral issue for the people of that era to undertake. Given many of their views of the world I’m surprised they did.
And now that that issue is fully settled no matter how leftists try to revisit it we need to get started making sure that we don’t end up slaves ourselves.
19 October, 2009 at 7:26 pm
We already are slaves, indentured servants, sold into eternal bondage by government indebting us and future generations to pay for their vote-buying and political payback. We have been fools to ignore their machinations for so long. We live under tyranny now. A soft tyranny (so far), but tyranny nonetheless.
The burning question now is: Can we achieve freedom for ourselves and our posterity, and at what cost?
19 October, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Yes in some ways we have come full circle our bodies enslaved and our minds under attack. That could go a long way to explain the dumbing down of America through immigration and education. An educated slave is a dangerous slave. Its better to have them liquored up and fighting instead. The irony is that they have done this by the taking of our freedoms through laws and taxation. With every new law or regulation comes more money. The branches of guvmint have effectively conspired together to rob us of our freedom and prosperity. That may not have been the intention but still that has what has happened.
and so now we come to the third fork in the road with the choice being liberty or slavery. My money is on liberty.
19 October, 2009 at 10:33 pm
hear, hear.
I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Patrick Henry speech before the Virginia House, March 23, 1775. One of the best speeches of American history, in my view. Did you know he was only 24 at the time?
19 October, 2009 at 10:57 pm
I knew he was young but not that young.
18 November, 2009 at 11:56 am
“An incident earlier this year in rural Iowa, not inside the Washington Beltway, motivated Rhodes to start Oath Keepers.
He questioned why the Iowa National Guard planned to use residents of a small town to participate in training on door-to-door searches for weapons.
The Guard said the training was to help soldiers who might be asked to carry out similar searches in Iraq or Afghanistan.”….
It is plain to see that the problem is in the fact that it involves the Iowa National Guard…if the sound of that doesn’t make you laugh, then there is something wrong. What good comes out of Iowa…Really?