Claymore sent us this link from the Las Vegas Review Journal which profiles the Oath Keepers;
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.
I guess this is just Rhodes’ way of justifying the Department of Homeland Security’s report about right wing terrorists. My personal conflict is that the only person the Review Journal could find to comment against Oath Keepers is my old friend Mark Potok, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who happens to see hate groups around every corner;
“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.”
Yeah, whenever Potok says “I’m not accusing…” that’s exactly what he’s doing. Why else would he be writing in a column he calls “Hate Watch”? Stuart Rhodes is a former Ron Paul staffer, and we saw how quickly the Ron Paul movement petered out last year. They became an annoyance, but they’re certainly not dangerous – unless Stuart Rhodes doesn’t tone down the rhetoric.
On the other hand, SPLC, in perpetual search of hate groups doesn’t do the discourse any favors by amping up the hate talk.
According to the law center, militia groups are re-emerging in this country partly as a result of racial animosity toward Obama.
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.”
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.
It would have been nice of the Review Journal to mention that the DHS report leaned heavily on the SPLC’s own “research”. So quoting the DHS report is the same as quoting Mark Potok – and includes his intellectually-vacant rhetoric.
So you see how I’m conflicted – two organizations who are equally distasteful engaged in equally harmful verbal warfare. I don’t know for whom to root – I guess the best I can hope for is mutual annihilation.
