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Mar 10Under oath.
This Mother Jones profile of the Oath Keepers, a right-wing “patriot” group, is worth reading in full. In a nutshell, it’s a group composed mostly of soldiers who are willing to defy orders they think are unconstitutional. Unsurprisingly, Glenn Beck admires their willingness to stand against Obama:
In [Army Private Lee] Pray’s estimate, it might not be long (months, perhaps a year) before President Obama finds some pretext—a pandemic, a natural disaster, a terror attack—to impose martial law, ban interstate travel, and begin detaining citizens en masse. One of his fellow Oath Keepers, a former infantryman, advised me to prepare a “bug out” bag with 39 items including gas masks, ammo, and water purification tablets, so that I’d be ready to go “when the shit hits the fan.”
When it does, Pray and his buddies plan to go AWOL and make their way to their “fortified bunker”—the home of one comrade’s parents in rural Idaho—where they’ve stocked survival gear, generators, food, and weapons. If it becomes necessary, they say, they will turn those guns against their fellow soldiers.
This just reinforces my belief that nothing good happens in Idaho. After the jump, more whackadoo theories in the mix:
Oath Keepers is officially nonpartisan, in part to make it easier for active-duty soldiers to participate, but its rightward bent is undeniable, and liberals are viewed with suspicion. At lunch, when I questioned my tablemates about the Obama-Hitler comparisons I’d heard at the conference, I got a step-by-step tutorial on how the president’s socialized medicine agenda would beget a Nazi-style regime.
I learned that bringing guns to Tea Party protests was a reminder of our constitutional rights, was introduced to the notion that the founding fathers modeled their governing documents on the Bible, and debated whether being Muslim meant an inability to believe in and abide by—and thus be protected by—the Constitution. I was schooled on the treachery of the Federal Reserve and why America needs a gold standard, and at dinner one night, Nighta Davis, national organizer for the National 912 Project, explained how abortion-rights advocates are part of a eugenics program targeting Christians.
It also goes without saying the group has some…unsavory members.
In January, [Oath Keeper Charles] Dyer was arrested on charges of raping a seven-year-old girl. When sheriff’s deputies raided his home, they found a Colt M-203 grenade launcher believed to have been stolen from a California military base. He now faces federal weapons charges and is being hailed by fringe militia groups like the American Resistance Movement as “the first POW of the second American Revolution.”
It’s probably not good for any future political campaigns to admit that I share some–really, any–common ground with these “patriots,” but I actually agree with them on a few of their ten “Orders We Will Not Obey:”
2. We will NOT obey any order to conduct warrantless searches of the American people, their homes, vehicles, papers, or effects — such as warrantless house-to house searches for weapons or persons.
3. We will NOT obey any order to detain American citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants” or to subject them to trial by military tribunal.
7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.
9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies, under any emergency pretext whatsoever.
10. We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.
Now, I don’t really believe that an “order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps” is coming anytime soon. I haven’t heard any Oath Keepers complain about warrantless cell phone tracking or the Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act of 2010, and I don’t believe for a second that their members care about Jose Padilla. Moreover, I sincerely doubt that this organization would be anything but a fringe militia group if there were a Republican in the White House, and a lot of their most vocal members seem pretty unhinged. However, even if they’re only driven by their fantastic paranoia, any pushback on civil rights from the crazysauce right-wing is something to…well, not applaud, certainly, but maybe worth a cautiously-approving nod.
Of course, toying with trained killers’ fears is playing with fire, and there’s always the chance that one of their members will snap and try to destroy the government singlehandedly.
Tagged: civil liberty, culture, news, politics
March 22nd, 2010 at 2:57 pm
Read this article in its dead trees form at a friends house. Someone somewhere mentioned that if progressives started bringing guns to their rallies, maybe the media would start paying more attention. (it would probably just result in a lot more mass arrests).
Also more Idaho: don’t know if you’ve heard of Searching for Whitopia, but the author’s quest for whiteness brings him right to…Coeur d’Alene, Idaho! Which wouldn’t be bad per se were the town not once white supremacist central.