Some Call It Treason

Oath Oaf.

Move over, Birthers. Step aside, Deathers. Back up, Tenthers. We need to make room for — Oathers:

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.

We can imagine a different scenario, one involving an armed paranoid militia playing out Seven Days in May instead of Red Dawn. Although we prefer our dystopian nightmares to end in pie fights.

READY TO REVOLT: Oath Keepers pledges to prevent dictatorship in United States [Las Vegas Review-Journal]

Photo: Active Duty Troops In Iraq Are Wearing Oath Keeper Tabs [Oath Keepers]

Related: Coup Are You? [Stinque]

20 Comments

I was reading this earlier. almost unbelievable. I always wonder what these freaks would have done, or what the administration would have done for that matter since people who questioned Bush in the gym got visits from the secret service, if some lefties had done this shit when Bush was president.
probably they would have ended up in GitMo.

a side note. I have been talking about this for months. really ever since Obama won. quite apart from all the reports like the one from the government and from the SPLC I can tell you these people are on the move. I have militia types in my family. I hear stuff. I try not to be paranoid but it sort of comes with the territory. I dont get much luck getting people to take this stuff seriously and the should. they absolutely should. these people are armed. they are serious. they are organized. and they are dangerous.

And the founder of OK is a Paultard. Who could have predicted?

Eight years, ten months too late.

“Homeland Security since 1492.”

tj/ I have an extra seat ticket to see U2 in Las Vegas this Friday. Email me at redmanlaw at gmail dot com if interested.

A question for those here with more military background: if the picture really is of an active-duty soldier, isn’t the wearing of these clearly non-regulation insignia a violation of the uniform regs? A quick skim over some online references seems to imply that it is.

And in that case, how soon can we expect to see these “Oathers” in the brig?

And somehow its just perfect that they all make their living off the people’s taxes. Those libertarians and their government checks.

@Prommie: Are you in Vegas this weekend? Email me at redmanlaw at gmail .com or send a message to my FB inbox. We may be going for fish and chips Friday afternoon before the U2 show at the British pub on Tropicana where the Killers got their start.

@al2o3cr: Any “Mall Ninja” can pick that shit up anywhere and dress up to play Army.

what does “three percent” mean?

@Capt Howdy: from the Oather web page:

Now, seeing the other tab and patch in the photo, you may ask “what is a three percenter?” The narrowest definition is that three percenters are hard-line gun owners who are done backing up and will not comply with more infringements of their right to bear arms. A broader definition would be that they are hard-line Americans who are done backing up and will not comply with further infringement of any of their rights. It also alludes to the three percent of the colonists who took to the field against the King during the Revolution, and the estimation that at least three percent of modern Americans will actively fight, if it comes to it, to preserve liberty. Read this essay for more explanation.

@redmanlaw: 3 percent of the U.S. population works out to 9.1 million — or three times the Fox audience. They have their work cut out for them.

@redmanlaw:

Wow. That is both tiresome AND fake history at the same time.

@redmanlaw: I love this kind of illogic that completely ignores the French Army and Navy which intervened pretty decisively on the side of the “three percent” of the colonists. Anyone on the Oather web pages mentioning which foreign armed forces will be intervening on their behalf when their big revolution kicks off? The Taliban? Osama bin Laden is probably available.

I can’t wait for Fox News coverage of Oather’s spending a winter camped at Valley Forge away from their TVs, pizza and beer. Will they be dedicated enough to miss the Super Bowl?

after reading the orders they pledge not to obey I am temped to join.

I thought three percent was the gay. Aren’t we at least that? I know it seems like every other man you stumble into at Home Depot has got at least one pierced nipple but looks can be decieving.

@Tommmcatt is hunkered down in the trenches: Kisses. Wait. Does that come off.. you know… funny? Cos I mean it man to man. Wait. So we were watching Carmen Jones last night – I’d never seen it before – and it was really pretty damn good. My God Belafonte was beautiful!… Wait. Um…

@Dave H: Fucking WORD, dude! Les Franch bankrupted les selves fighting a proxy war with we Brits (poor fools) on behalf of the colonies. While the yeomen soldiers were packing it in and going home to Woodstock to harvest the mangels the poor dumb Franch were facing the might of the greatest fighting force ever seen on the planet, aka, Brits. Wootah!

@JNOV: Isn’t it the best? I mean, grave and sexy and slightly preposterous? What the hell was Pearl Bailey wearing anyhow? What so moved me was Hammerstein’s intention. With Porgy and Bess, the Gershwins translated a hit play into a serious look at yesterday. They went to the Low Country and did their best to bring what they saw to the stage. They elevated, as it were, the ‘folk’ idiom into popular opera. What Hammerstein did was to clear the decks and put grand opera onto the lives of black Americans at a time when the Army, etc was segregated. In its way I think it’s the more remarkable achievement. You do understand that I am only referring to white guys trying to understand black America? Let us put to one side the torrent of music produced by Ellington/Strayhorn – the great unsung American composer of the 20th cent – Basie, Armstrong, et al. This was the mainstream and a fine writer trying to expand the understanding of his audience. And wow, Belafonte was superb at the end. I used to try to sing that aria and it’s not easy. I know it’s dubbed but so well done. And those long, long takes! So difficult to stage. I kept wondering how many takes were done. Preminger never did anything better.

I started looking into 3 percenters, and immediately got into scarytown, its 2 degrees of separation to McVeigh. And then you see, the whole teaparty movement, its the patriot movement, its McVeigh’s same cause, exactly, same ideology, but now more accepted, more widespread. Clinton inherited Waco, luckily, Obama has not had to have a showdown with any of these crazies yet. But when he does, as soon as their is a Waco or Ruby Ridge, and there will be, there will also be another Oklahoma City bombing, or worse, these people are smart, smarter than the 9-11 terrorists, they didn’t have to hijack an airplane with boxcutters, because they figured out what can be done with fertilizer and diesel fuel. And they already infiltrate everything in our society, and are invisible, and can get all the tank trucks and diesel and fertilizer they need.

The Adkisson brigades, I am sure, have the knowledge and ability to do all the things we fear the mooslims doing, and do it far more easily, with no suspicion, no swarthy guttaral guys moping around the refinery, nope, just good old ‘Murrican boys, nothing to be suspicious about.

From the SPLC:

Oath Keepers, the military and police organization that was formed earlier this year and held its April muster on Lexington Green, may be a particularly worrisome example of the Patriot revival. Members vow to fulfill the oaths to the Constitution that they swore while in the military or law enforcement. “Our oath is to the Constitution, not to the politicians, and we will not obey unconstitutional (and thus illegal) and immoral orders,” the group says. Oath Keepers lists 10 orders its members won’t obey, including two that reference U.S. concentration camps.

That same pugnacious attitude was on display after conservatives attacked an April report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that suggested a resurgence of radical right-wing activity was under way. “We will not fear our government; they will fear us,” one man, who appeared to be on active duty in the Army, said in an angry video sent to the Oath Keepers blog. In another video at the site, a man who said he was a former Army paratrooper in Afghanistan and Iraq described President Obama as “an enemy of the state,” adding, “I would rather die than be a slave to my government.” The Oath Keepers site soon began hawking T-shirts with slogans like “I’m a Right Wing Extremist and Damn Proud of It!”

In April, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes — a Yale Law School graduate and former aide to U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (a Texas Republican and hard-line libertarian) — worried about a coming dictatorship. “We know that if the day should come where a full-blown dictatorship would come, or tyranny … it can only happen if those men, our brothers in arms, go along and comply with unconstitutional, unlawful orders,” Rhodes told conspiracy-minded radio host Alex Jones. “Imagine if we focus on the police and military. Game over for the New World Order.”

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